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ONE HOUSE ON THE PINNACLE LOOKING OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

The Last
Book of Wonder

Lord Dunsany

With Illustrations by

S. H. SIME

BOSTON
JOHN W. LUCE & COMPANY

Preface

Ebrington Barracks
Aug. 16th 1916.

I do not know where I may be when this
preface is read. As I write it in August 1916,
I am at Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry,
recovering from a slight wound. But it
does not greatly matter where I am; my
dreams are here before you amongst the
following pages; and writing in a day when
life is cheap, dreams seem to me all the
dearer, the only things that survive.

Just now the civilization of Europe seems
almost to have ceased, and nothing seems
to grow in her torn fields but death, yet this
is only for a while and dreams will come
back again and bloom as of old, all the more

Preface

radiantly for this terrible ploughing, as the
flowers will bloom again where the trenches
are and the primroses shelter in shell-holes
for many seasons, when weeping Liberty
has come home to Flanders.

To some of you in America this may seem
an unnecessary and wasteful quarrel, as
other people's quarrels often are; but it
comes to this that though we are all killed
there will be songs again, but if we were to
submit and so survive there could be neither
songs nor dreams, nor any joyous free things
any more.

And do not regret the lives that are
wasted amongst us, or the work that the
dead would have done, for war is no accident
that man's care could have averted, but is
as natural, though not as regular, as the
tides; as well regret the things that the tide
has washed away, which destroys and
cleanses and crumbles, and spares the
minutest shells.

Preface

And now I will write nothing further
about our war, but offer you these books of
dreams from Europe as one throws things
of value, if only to oneself, at the last
moment out of a burning house.

DUNSANY.

Contents

PAGE
A TALE OF LONDON .... 1

vg; THIRTEEN AT TABLE . . . . 8 v^"

O THE CITY ON MALLINGTON MOOR . . 27 -
WHY THE MILKMAN SHUDDERS WHEN HE

PERCEIVES THE DAWN .... 42

THE BAD OLD WOMAN IN BLACK . . 48

THE BIRD OF THE DIFFICULT EYE . . 53

THE LONG PORTER'S TALE ... 60

THE LOOT OF LOMA .... 72
THE SECRET OF THE SEA ... 80

How An CAME TO THE BLACK COUNTRY . 88
THE BUREAU D'ECHANGE DE MAUX . 96

A STORY OF LAND AND SEA . . . 106

A TALE OF THE EQUATOR . . . 153

V NARROW ESCAPE .... 159

THE WATCH-TOWER .... 164
How PLASH-GOO CAME TO THE LAND OF

NONE'S DESIRE 169

THE THREE SAILOR'S GAMBIT . . . 173

THE EXILES CLUB 190

THE THREE INFERNAL JOKES . 200

List of Illustrations

ONE HOUSE ON THE PINNACLE LOOKING OVER
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD . . Frontispiece

To face page

THE BAD OLD WOMAN IN BLACK RAN DOWN
THE STREET OF THE OX-BUTCHERS . 48

THERE STOOD THAT LONELY, GNARLED AND
DECIDUOUS TREE . . . . 58

THEY HAD GONE THREE DAYS ALONG THAT
NARROW LEDGE 72

MIDNIGHT AND MOONLIGHT AND THE TEMPLE
IN THE SEA ..... 86

GUIDED BY ALI, ALL THREE SET FORTH FOR
THE MIDLANDS 90

A Tale of London

ome," said the Sultan to his
hasheesh-eater in the very
furthest lands that know
Bagdad, "dream to me now
of London."

And the hasheesh-eater
made a low obeisance and seated himself
cross-legged upon a purple cushion broid-
ered with golden poppies, on the floor, be-
side an ivory bowl where the hasheesh was,
and having eaten liberally of the hasheesh
blinked seven times and spoke thus:

"0 Friend of God, know then that
London is the desiderate town even of all
Earth's cities. Its houses are of ebony and
cedar which they roof with thin copper
plates that the hand of Time turns green.
They have golden balconies in which ame-
thysts are where they sit and watch the
sunset. Musicians in the gloaming steal

The Lout Book of Wonder

softly along the ways; unheard their feet
fall on the white sea-sand with which those
ways are strewn, and in the darkness sud-
denly they play on dulcimers and instru-
ments with strings. Then are there mur-
murs in the balconies praising their skill,
then are there bracelets cast down to them
for reward and golden necklaces and even
pearls.

"Indeed but the city is fair; there is by
the sandy ways a paving all alabaster, and
the lanterns along it are of chrysoprase,
all night long they shine green, but of ame-
thyst are the lanterns of the balconies.

"As the musicians go along the ways dan-
cers gather about them and dance upon the
alabaster pavings, for joy and not for hire.
Sometimes a window opens far up in an
ebony palace and a wreath is cast down to
a dancer or orchids showered upon them.

"Indeed of many cities have I dreamt
but of none fairer, through many marble
metropolitan gates hasheesh has led me,
but London is its secret, the last gate of all;
the ivory bowl has nothing more to show.
And indeed even now the imps that crawl
behind me and that will not let me be are

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plucking me by the elbow and bidding my
spirit return, for well they know that I
have seen too much. 'No, not London,'
they say; and therefore I will speak of some
other city, a city of some less mysterious
land, and anger not the imps with forbidden
things. I will speak of Persepolis or fa-
mous Thebes."

A shade of annoyance crossed the Sul-
tan's face, a look of thunder that you had
scarcely seen, but in those lands they
watched his visage well, and though his
spirit was wandering far away and his eyes
were bleared with hasheesh yet that story-
teller there and then perceived the look
that was death, and sent his spirit back at
once to Condon as a man runs into his house
when the thunder comes.

"And therefore," he continued, "in the
desiderate city, in London, all their camels
are pure white. Remarkable is the swift-
ness of their horses, that draw their chariots
that are of ivory along those sandy ways
and that are of surpassing lightness, they
have little bells of silver upon their horses'
heads. 0 Friend of God, if you perceived
their merchants! The glory of their dresses

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in the noonday! They are no less gorgeous
than those butterflies that float about their
streets. They have overcloaks of green
and vestments of azure, huge purple flow-
ers blaze on their overcloaks, the work of
cunning needles, the centres of the flowers
are of gold and the petals of purple. All
their hats are black — " ("No, no," said
the Sultan) — "but irises are set about the
brims, and green plumes float above the
crowns of them.

"They have a river that is named the
Thames, on it their ships go up with violet
sails bringing incense for the braziers that
perfume the streets, new songs exchanged
for gold with alien tribes, raw silver for
the statues of their heroes, gold to make
balconies where their women sit, great
apphires to reward their poets with, the
ecrets of old cities and strange lands, the
earning of the dwellers in far isles, emeralds,
diamonds and the hoards of the sea. And
whenever a ship comes into port and furls
its violet sails and the news spreads through
London that she has come, then all the
merchants go down to the river to barter,
and all day long the chariots whirl through

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the streets, and the sound of their going is
a mighty roar all day until evening, their
roar is even like — "

"Not so," said the Sultan.

"Truth is not hidden from the Friend of
God," replied the hasheesh-eater, "I have
erred being drunken with hasheesh, for in
the desiderate city, even in London, so
thick upon the ways is the white sea-sand
with which the city glimmers that no
sound comes from the path of the char-
ioteers, but they go softly like a light sea-
wind." ("It is well," said the Sultan.)
"They go softly down to the port where the
vessels are, and the merchandise in from
the sea, amongst the wonders that the sail-
ors show, on land by the high ships, and
softly they go though swiftly at evening
back to their homes.

"0 would that the Munificent, the Illus-
trious, the Friend of God, had even seen
these things, had seen the jewellers with
their empty baskets, bargaining there by
the ships, when the barrels of emeralds
came up from the hold. Or would that he
had seen the fountains there in silver
basins in the midst of the ways. I have

5 • •

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seen small spires upon their ebony houses
and the spires were all of gold, birds strutted
there upon the copper roofs from golden
spire to spire that have no equal for splen-
dour in all the woods of the world. And
over London the desiderate city the sky
is so deep a blue that by this alone the
traveller may know where he has come,
and may end his fortunate journey. Nor
yet for any colour of the sky is there too
great heat in London, for along its ways a
wind blows always from the South gently
and cools the city.

"Such, 0 Friend of God, is indeed the city
of London, lying very far off on the yonder
side of Bagdad, without a peer for beauty
or excellence of its ways among all the
towns of the earth or cities of song; and
even so, as I have told, its fortunate citi-
zens dwell, with their hearts ever devising
beautiful things and from the beauty of
their own fair work that is more abundant
around them every year, receiving new
inspirations to work things more beautiful
yet."

"And is their government good?" the
Sultan said,

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"It is most good," said the hasheesh-
eater, and fell backwards upon the floor.

He lay thus and was silent. And when
the Sultan perceived he would speak no
more that night he smiled and lightly
applauded.

And there was envy in that palace, in
lands beyond Bagdad, of all that dwell in
London.

Thirteen at Table

[n front of a spacious fireplace
[of the old kind, when the logs
iwere well alight, and men
with pipes and glasses were
gathered before it in great
easeful chairs, and the wild
weather outside and the comfort that was
within, and the season of the year — for it
was Christmas — and the hour of the night,
all called for the weird or uncanny, then out
spoke the ex-master of foxhounds and told
this tale.

I once had an odd experience too. It
was when I had the Bromley and Syden-
ham, the year I gave them up — as a mat-
ter of fact it was the last day of the season.
It was no use going on because there were
no foxes left in the county, and London
was sweeping down on us. You could see
it from the kennels all along the skyline

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like a terrible army in grey, and masses of
villas every year came skirmishing down
our valleys. Our coverts were mostly on
the hills, and as the town came down upon
the valleys the foxes used to leave them
and go right away out |of the county and
they never returned. I think they went
by night and moved great distances. Well
it was early April and we had drawn blank
all day, and at the last draw of all, the very
last of the season, we found a fox. He left
the covert with his back to London and its
railways and villas and wire and slipped
away towards the chalk country and open
Kent. I felt as I once felt as a child on one
summer's day when I found a door in a
garden where I played left luckily ajar, and
I pushed it open and the wide lands were
before me and waving fields of corn.

We settled down into a steady gallop and
the fields began to drift by under us, and a
great wind arose full of fresh breath. We
left the clay lands where the bracken grows
and came to a valley at the edge of the chalk.
As we went down into it we saw the fox go
up the other side like a shadow that crosses
the evening, and glide into a wood that

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stood on the top. We saw a flash of prim-
roses in the wood and we were out the other
side, hounds hunting perfectly and the fox
still going absolutely straight. It began
to dawn on me then that we were in for a
great hunt, I took a deep breath when I
thought of it; the taste of the air of that
perfect Spring afternoon as it came to one
galloping, and the thought of a great run,
were together like some old rare wine.
Our faces now were to another valley, large
fields led down to it, with easy hedges, at
the bottom of it a bright blue stream went
singing and a rambling village smoked, the
sunlight on the opposite slopes danced like
a fairy; and all along the top old woods were
frowning, but they dreamed of Spring.
The "field' 'had fallen off and were far behind
and my only human companion was James,
my old first whip, who had a hound's in-
stinct, and a personal animosity against a
fox that even embittered his speech.

Across the valley the fox went as straight
as a railway line, and again we went with-
out a check straight through the woods at
the top. I remember hearing men sing or
shout as they walked home from work, and

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sometimes children whistled; the sounds
came up from the village to the woods at
the top of the valley. After that we saw
no more villages, but valley after valley
arose and fell before us as though we were
voyaging some strange and stormy sea, and
all the way before us the fox went dead up-
wind like the fabulous Flying Dutchman.
There was no one in sight now but my first
whip and me, we had both of us got on to
our second horses as we drew the last covert.

Two or three times we checked in those
great lonely valleys beyond the village, but
I began to have inspirations, I felt a strange
certainty within me that this fox was going
on straight up-wind till he died or until
night came and we could hunt no longer, so
I reversed ordinary methods and only cast
straight ahead and always we picked up
the scent again at once. I believe that this
fox was the last one left in the villa-haunted
lands and that he was prepared to leave
them for remote uplands far from men, that
if we had come the following day he would
not have been there, and that we just hap-
pened to hit off his journey.

Evening began to descend upon the
11

The Last Book °f Wonder

valleys, still the hounds drifted on, like the
lazy but unresting shadows of clouds upon
a summer's day, we heard a shepherd calling
to his dog, we saw two maidens move to-
wards a hidden farm, one of them singing
softly; no other sounds, but ours, disturbed
the leisure and the loneliness of haunts that
seemed not yet to have known the inven-
tions of steam and gun-powder (even as
China, they say, in some of her furthest
mountains does not yet know that she has
fought Japan).

And now the day and our horses were
wearing out, but that resolute fox held on.
I began to work out the run and to wonder
where we were. The last landmark I had
ever seen before must have been over five
miles back and from there to the start was
at least ten miles more. If only we could
kill! Then the sun set. I wondered what
chance we had of killing our fox. I looked
at James' face as he rode beside me. He
did not seem to have lost any confidence,
yet his horse was as tired as mine. It was
a good clear twilight and the scent was as
strong as ever, and the fences were easy
enough, but those valleys were terribly

12 .

The Last Book of Wonder

trying and they still rolled on and on.
It looked as if the light would outlast all
possible endurance both of the fox and the
horses, if the scent held good and he did not
go to ground, otherwise night would end it.
For long we had seen no houses and no
roads, only chalk slopes with the twilight on
them, and here and there some sheep, and
scattered copses darkening in the evening.
At some moment I seemed to realise all at
once that the light was spent and that dark-
ness was hovering, I looked at James, he
was solemnly shaking his head. Suddenly
in a little wooded valley we saw climb over
the oaks the red-brown gables of a queer
old house, at that instant I saw the fox
scarcely heading by fifty yards. We blun-
dered through a wood into full sight of the
house, but no avenue led up to it or even
a path nor were there any signs of wheel-
marks anywhere. Already lights shone
here and there in windows. We were in a
park, and a fine park, but unkempt beyond
credibility; brambles grew everywhere. It
was too dark to see the fox any more but we
knew he was dead beat, the hounds were just
before us, — and a four-foot railing of oak.

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I shouldn't have tried it on a fresh horse at
the beginning of a run, and here was a horse
near his last gasp. But what a run! an
event standing out in a lifetime, and the
hounds close up on their fox, slipping into
the darkness as I hesitated. I decided to
try it. My horse rose about eight inches
and took it fair with his breast, and the oak
log flew into handfuls of wet decay — it was
rotten with years. And then we were on
a lawn and at the far end of it the hounds
were tumbling over their fox. Fox, horses
and light were all done together at the end
of a twenty-mile point. We made some
noise then, but nobody came out of the
queer old house.

I felt pretty stiff as I walked round to the
hall door with the mask and the brush
while James went with the hounds and the
two horses to look for the stables. I rang
a bell marvellously encrusted with rust, and
after a long while the door opened a little
way revealing a hall with much old armour
in it and the shabbiest butler that I have
ever known.

I asked him who lived there. Sir Rich-
ard Arlen, I explained that my horse

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could go no further that night and that I
wished to ask Sir Richard Arlen for a bed
for the night.

"0, no one ever comes here, sir," said the
butler.

I pointed out that I had come.

"I don't think it would be possible, sir,"
he said.

This annoyed me and I asked to see Sir
Richard, and insisted until he came. Then
I apologised and explained the situation.
He looked only fifty, but a 'Varsity oar on
the wall with the date of the early seventies,
made him older than that; his face had
something of the shy look of the hermit;
he regretted that he had not room to put
me up. I was sure that this was untrue,
also I had to be put up there, there was no-
where else within miles, so I almost insisted.
Then to my astonishment he turned to the
butler and they talked it over in an under-
tone. At last they seemed to think that
they could manage it, though clearly with
reluctance. It was by now seven o'clock and
Sir Richard told me he dined at half past
seven. There was no question of clothes
for me other than those I stood in, as my

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host was shorter and broader. He showed
me presently to the drawing-room and there
he reappeared before half past seven in
evening dress and a white waistcoat. The
drawing-room was large and contained old
furniture but it was rather worn than ven-
erable, an Aubusson carpet flapped about
the floor, the wind seemed momently to
enter the room, and old draughts haunted
corners; the stealthy feet of rats that were
never at rest indicated the extent of the
ruin that time had wrought in the wain-
scot; somewhere far off a shutter flapped to
and fro, the guttering candles were insuffi-
cient to light so large a room. The gloom
that these things suggested was quite in
keeping with Sir Richard's first remark to
me after he entered the room: "I must
tell you, sir, that I have led a wicked life.
O, a very wicked life."

Such confidences from a man much older
than oneself after one has known him for
half an hour are so rare that any possible
answer merely does not suggest itself. I
said rather slowly, "0, really," and chiefly
to forestall another such remark I said,
"What a charming house you have."

The Last Book of Wonder

"Yes," he said, "I have not left it for
nearly forty years. Since I left the 'Varsity.
One is young there, you know, and one has
opportunities; but I make no excuses, no
excuses." And the door slipping its rusty
latch, came drifting on the draught into the
room, and the long carpet flapped and the
hangings upon the walls, then the draught
fell rustling away and the door slammed to
again.

"Ah, Marianne," he said, "we have a
guest to-night. Mr. Linton. This is
Marianne Gib." And everything became
clear to me. "Mad," I said to myself, for
no one had entered the room.

The rats ran up the length of the room
behind the wainscot ceaselessly, and the
wind unlatched the door again and the folds
of the carpet fluttered up to our feet and
stopped there, for our weight held it down.

"Let me introduce Mr. Linton," said
my host — "Lady Mary Errinjer."

The door slammed back again. I bowed
politely. Even had I been invited I should
have humoured him, but it was the very
least that an uninvited guest could do.

This kind of thing happened eleven times,

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the rustling, and the fluttering of the carpet,
and the footsteps of the rats, and the rest-
less door, and then the sad voice of my host
introducing me to phantoms. Then for
some while we waited while I struggled
with the situation; conversation flowed
slowly. And again the draught came trail-
ing up the room, while the flaring candles
filled it with hurrying shadows. "Ah, late
again, Cicely," said my host in his soft,
mournful way. "Always late, Cicely."
Then I went down to dinner with that man
and his mind and the twelve phantoms that
haunted it. I found a long table with fine
old silver on it and places laid for fourteen.
The butler was now in evening dress, there
were fewer draughts in the dining-room, the
scene was less gloomy there. "Will you
sit next to Rosalind at the other end," Sir
Richard said to me. " She always takes the
head of the table, I wronged her most of all."
I said, "I shall be delighted."

I looked at the butler closely, but never
did I see by any expression of his face or by
anything that he did any suggestion that
he waited upon less than fourteen people in
the complete possession of all their faculties.

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Perhaps a dish appeared to be refused more
often than taken but every glass was
equally filled with champagne. At first
I found little to say, but when Sir Richard
speaking from the far end of the table said,
"You are tired, Mr. Linton," I was re-
minded that I owed something to a host
upon whom I had forced myself. It was
excellent champagne and with the help of
a second glass I made the effort to begin a
conversation with a Miss Helen Errold for
whom the place upon one side of me was
laid. It came more easy to me very soon,
I frequently paused in my monologue, like
Mark Anthony, for a reply, and some-
times I turned and spoke to Miss Rosalind
Smith. Sir Richard at the other end
talked sorrowfully on, he spoke as a con-
demned man might speak to his judge,
and yet somewhat as a judge might speak
to one that he once condemned wrongly.
My own mind began to turn to mournful
things. I drank another glass of cham-
pagne, but I was still thirsty. I felt as if
all the moisture in my body had been blown
away over the downs of Kent by the wind
up which we had galloped. Still I was not

The Last Book of Wonder

talking enough; my host was looking at me.
I made another effort, after all I had some-
thing to talk about, a twenty-mile point is
not often seen in a lifetime, especially south
of the Thames. I began to describe the
run to Rosalind Smith. I could see then
that my host was pleased, the sad look in
his face gave a kind of a flicker, like mist
upon the mountains on a miserable day
when a faint puff comes from the sea and
the mist would lift if it could. And the
butler refilled my glass very attentively.
I asked her first if she hunted, and paused
and began my story. I told her where we
had found the fox and how fast and straight
he had gone, and how I had got through the
village by keeping to the road, while the
little gardens and wire, and then the river,
had stopped the rest of the field. I told
her the kind of country that we crossed and
how splendid it looked in the Spring, and
how mysterious the valleys were as soon as
the twilight came, and what a glorious
horse I had and how wonderfully he went.
I was so fearfully thirsty after the great
hunt that I had to stop for a moment now
and then, but I went on with my descrip-

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tion of that famous run, for I had wanned
to the subject, and after all there was
nobody to tell of it but me except my old
whipper-in, and "the old fellow's probably
drunk by now," I thought. I described to
her minutely the exact spot in the run at
which it had come to me clearly that this
was going to be the greatest hunt in the
whole history of Kent. Sometimes I for-
got incidents that had happened as one
well may in a run of twenty miles, and
then I had to fill in the gaps by inventing.
I was pleased to be able to make the party
go off well by means of my conversation,
and besides that the lady to whom I was
speaking was extremely pretty: I do not
mean in a flesh and blood kind of way but
there were little shadowy lines about the
chair beside me that hinted at an unusually
graceful figure when Miss Rosalind Smith
was alive; and I began to perceive that
what I first mistook for the smoke of gut-
tering candles and a table-cloth waving in
the draught was in reality an extremely
animated company who listened, and not
without interest, to my story of by far the
greatest hunt that the world had ever

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known: indeed I told them that I would
confidently go further and predict that
never in the history of the world would there
be such a run again. Only my throat was
terribly dry. And then as it seemed they
wanted to hear more about my horse. I
had forgotten that I had come there on a
horse, but when they reminded me it all
came back; they looked so charming lean-
ing over the table intent upon what I said,
that I told them everything they wanted
to know. Everything was going so pleas-
antly if only Sir Richard would cheer up.
I heard his mournful voice every now and
then — these were very pleasant people
if only he would take them the right way.
I could understand that he regretted his
past, but the early seventies seemed cen-
turies away and I felt sure that he misunder-
stood these ladies, they were not revenge-
ful as he seemed to suppose. I wanted to
show him how cheerful they really were,
and so I made a joke and they all laughed
at it, and then I chaffed them a bit, espe-
cially Rosalind, and nobody resented it in
the very least. And still Sir Richard sat
there with that unhappy look, like one that
22

The Last Book of Wonder

has ended weeping because it is vain and
has not the consolation even of tears.

We had been a long time there and many
of7the candles had burned out, but there
was light enough. I was glad to have an
audience for my exploit, and being happy
myself I was determined Sir Richard should
be. I made more jokes and they still
laughed good-naturedly; some of the jokes
were a little broad perhaps but no harm
was meant. And then — I do not wish to
excuse myself — but I had had a harder day
than I ever had had before and without
knowing it I must have been completely
exhausted; in this state the champagne had
found me, and what would have been
harmless at any other time must somehow
have got the better of me when quite tired
out — anyhow I went too far, I made some
joke — I cannot in the least remember
what — that suddenly seemed to offend
them. I felt all at once a commotion in the
air, I looked up and saw that they had all
arisen from the table and were sweeping
towards the door: I had not time to open it
but it blew open on a wind, I could scarcely
see what Sir Richard was doing because

The Last Book of Wonder

only two candles were left, I think the rest
blew out when the ladies suddenly rose. I
sprang up to apologise, to assure them —
and then fatigue overcame me as it had
overcome my horse at the last fence, I
clutched at the table but the cloth came
away and then I fell. The fall, and the
darkness on the floor and the pent up
fatigue of the day overcame me all three
together.

The sun shone over glittering fields and
in at a bedroom window and thousands of
birds were chanting to the Spring, and there
I was in an old four-poster bed in a quaint
old panelled bedroom, fully dressed and
wearing long muddy boots; someone had
taken my spurs and that was all. For a
moment I failed to realise and then it all
came back, my enormity and the pressing
need of an abject apology to Sir Richard.
I pulled an embroidered bell rope until the
butler came. He came in perfectly cheerful
and indescribably shabby. I asked him if
Sir Richard was up, and he said he had just
gone down, and told me to my amazement
that it was twelve o'clock. I asked to be
shown in to Sir Richard at once. He was in his

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smoking-room. "Good morning," he said
cheerfully the moment I went in. I went
directly to the matter in hand. "I fear
that I insulted some ladies in your house -
I began.

"You did indeed," he said, "You did in-
deed." And then he burst into tears and
took me by the hand. "How can I ever
thank you?" he said to me then. "We
have been thirteen at table for thirty years
and I never dared to insult them because
I had wronged them all, and now you have
done it and I know they will never dine here
again." And for a long time he still held
my hand, and then he gave it a grip and a
kind of a shake which I took to mean "Good-
bye" and I drew my hand away then and
left the house. And I found James in the
stables with the hounds and asked him
how he had fared, and James, who is a man
of very few words, said he could not rightly
remember, and I got my spurs from the
butler and climbed on to my horse and
slowly we rode away from that queer old
house, and slowly we wended home, for the
hounds were footsore but happy and the
horses were tired still. And when we re-

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called that the hunting season was ended
we turned our faces to Spring and thought
of the new things that try to replace the old.
And that very year I heard, and have often
heard since, of dances and happier dinners
at Sir Richard Aden's house.

The City on
Mallington Moor

esides the old shepherd at
Lingwold whose habits ren-
der him unreliable I am prob-
ably the only person that
has ever seen the city on
Mallington Moor.
I had decided one year to do no London
season; partly because of the ugliness of the
things in the shops, partly because of the
unresisted invasions of German bands,
partly perhaps because some pet parrots
in the oblong where I lived had learned to
imitate cab- whistles; but chiefly because of
late there had seized me in London a quite
unreasonable longing for large woods and
waste spaces, while the very thought of
little valleys underneath copses full of
bracken and foxgloves was a torment to me
and every summer in London the longing

The Last Book of Wonder

grew worse till the thing was becoming
intolerable. So I took a stick and a knap-
sack and began walking northwards, start-
ing at Tetherington and sleeping at inns,
where one could get real salt, and the waiter
spoke English and where one had a name
instead of a number; and though the table-
cloth might be dirty the windows opened
so that the air was clean, where one had the
excellent company of farmers and men of
the wold, who could not be thoroughly
vulgar, because they had not the money
to be so even if they had wished it. At
first the novelty was delightful, and then
one day in a queer old inn up Uthering
way, beyond Lingwold, I heard for the first
time the rumour of the city said to be on
Mallington Moor. They spoke of it quite
casually over their glasses of beer, two farm-
ersjat the inn. "They say the queer folk
be at Mallington with their city," one
farmer said. "Travelling they seem to be,"
said the other. And more came in then and
the rumour spread. And then, such are the
contradictions of our little likes and dislikes
and all the whims that drive us, that I, who
had come so far to avoid cities, had a great

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longing all of a sudden for throngs again and
the great hives of Man, and then and there
determined on that bright Sunday morn-
ing to come to Mallington and there search
for the city that rumour spoke of so
strangely.

Mallington Moor, from all that they said
of it, was hardly a likely place to find a
thing by searching. It was a huge high
moor, very bleak and desolate and alto-
gether trackless. It seemed a lonely place
from what they said. The Normans when
they came had called it Mai Lieu and after-
wards Mallintown and so it changed to
Mallington. Though what a town can
ever have had to do with a place so utterly
desolate I do not know. And before that
some say that the Saxons called it Baplas,
which I believe to be a corruption of Bad
Place.

And beyond the mere rumour of a beau-
tiful city all of white marble and with a
foreign look up on Mallington Moor, beyond
this I could not get. None of them had
seen it himself, "only heard of it like," and
my questions, rather than stimulating con-
versation, would always stop it abruptly.

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I was no more fortunate on the road to Mal-
lington until the Tuesday, when I was quite
near it; I had been walking two days from
the inn where I had heard the rumour and
could see the great hill steep as a headland
on which Mallington lay, standing up on
the skyline: the hill was covered with grass,
where anything grew at all, but Mallington
Moor is all heather; it is just marked Moor
on the map; nobody goes there and they do
not trouble to name it. It was there where
the gaunt hill first came into sight, by the
roadside as I enquired for the marble city
of some labourers by the way, that I was
directed, partly I think in derision, to the
old shepherd of Lingwold. It appeared
that he, following sometimes sheep that had
strayed, and wandering far from Lingwold,
camQ sometimes up to the edge of Mal-
lington Moor, and that he would come back
from these excursions and shout through
the villages, raving of a city of white marble
and gold-tipped minarets. And hearing
me asking questions of this city they had
laughed and directed me to the shepherd of
Lingwold. One well-meant warning they gave
me as I went — the old man was not reliable.

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And late that evening I saw the thatches
of Lingwold sheltering under the edge of
that huge hill that Atlas-like held up those
miles of moor to the great winds and
heaven.

They knew less of the city in Lingwold
than elsewhere but they knew the where-
abouts of the man I wanted, though they
seemed a little ashamed of him. There was
an inn in Lingwold that gave me shelter,
whence in the morning, equipped with pur-
chases, I set out to find their shepherd.
And there he was on the edge of Mallington
Moor standing motionless, gazing stupidly
at his sheep; his hands trembled continually
and his eyes had a blear look, but he was
quite sober, wherein all Lingwold had
wronged him.

And then and there I asked him of the
city and he said he had never heard tell of
any such place. And I said, "Come, come,
you must pull yourself together." And he
looked angrily at me; but when he saw me
draw from amongst my purchases a full
bottle of whiskey and a big glass he became
more friendly. As I poured out the whis-
key I asked him again about the marble

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city on Mallington Moor but he seemed
quite honestly to know nothing about it.
The amount of whiskey he drank was quite
incredible, but I seldom express surprise and
once more I asked him the way to the won-
derful city. His hand was steadier now
and his eyes more intelligent and he said
that he had heard something of some such
city, but his memory was evidently blurred
and he was still unable to give me useful
directions. I consequently gave him an-
other tumbler, which he drank off like the
first without any water, and almost at once
he was a different man. The trembling in
his hands stopped altogether, his eye became
as quick as a younger man's, he answered
my questions readily and frankly, and,
what was more important to me still, his
old memory became alert and clear for even
minutest details. His gratitude to myself
I need not mention, for I make no pretence
that I bought the bottle of whiskey that the
old shepherd enjoyed so much without at
least some thought of my own advantage.
Yet itwas pleasant to reflect that it was due
to me that he had pulled himself together
and steadied his shaking hand and cleared

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his mind, recovered his memory and his
self-respect. He spoke to me quite clearly,
no longer slurring his words; he had seen
the city first one moonlight night when he
was lost in the mist on the big moor, he had
wandered far in the mist, and when it lifted
he saw the city by moonlight. He had no
food, but luckily had his flask. There never
was such a city, not even in books. Travel-
lers talked sometimes of Venice seen from
the sea, there might be such a place or there
might not, but, whether or no, it was noth-
ing to the city on Mallington Moor. Men
who read books had talked to him in his
time, hundreds of books, but they never
could tell of any city like this. Why, the
place was all of marble, roads, walls and
palaces, all pure white marble, and the tops
of the tall thin spires were entirely of gold.
And they were queer folk in the city even
for foreigners. And there were camels, but
I cut him short for I thought I could judge
for myself, if there was such a place, and, if
not, I was wasting my time as well as a pint
of good whiskey. So I got him to speak of
the way, and after more circumlocution
than I needed and more talk of the city he

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pointed to a tiny track on the black earth
just beside us, a little twisty way you could
hardly see.

I said the moor was trackless; untrodden
of man or dog it certainly was and seemed
to have less to do with the ways of man
than any waste I have seen, but the track
the old shepherd showed me, if track it was,
was no more than the track of a hare — an
elf-path the old man called it, Heaven knows
what he meant. And then before I left
him he insisted on giving me his flask Tyith
the queer strong rum it contained. Whis-
key brings out in some men melancholy, in
some rejoicing, with him it was clearly gen-
erosity and he insisted until I took his rum,
though I did not mean to drink it. It was
lonely up there, he said, and bitter cold and
the city hard to find, being set in a hollow,
and I should need the rum, and he had
never seen the marble city except on days
when he had had his flask: he seemed to
regard that rusted iron flask as a sort of
mascot, and in the end I took it.

I followed that odd, faint track on the
black earth under the heather till I came to
the big grey stone beyond the horizon, where

The Last Book °f Wonder

the track divides into two, and I took the
one to the left as the old man told me. I
knew by another stone that I saw far off
that I had not lost my way, nor the old man
lied.

And just as I hoped to see the city's ram-
parts before the gloaming fell on that des-
olate place, I suddenly saw a long high wall
of whiteness with pinnacles here and there
thrown up above it, floating towards me
silent and grim as a secret, and knew it for
that evil thing the mist. The sun, though
low, was shining on every sprig of heather,
the green and scarlet mosses were shining
with it too, it seemed incredible that in three
minutes' time all those colours would be
gone and nothing left all round but a grey
darkness. I gave up hope of finding the city
that day, a broader path than mine could
have been quite easily lost. I hastily chose
for my bed a thick patch of heather,
wrapped myself in a waterproof cloak, and
lay down and made myself comfortable.
And then the mist came. It came like the
careful pulling of lace curtains, then like the
drawing of grey blinds; it shut out the hori-
zon to the north, then to the east and west;

The Last Book of Wonder

it turned the whole sky white and hid the
moor; it came down on it like a metropolis,
only utterly silent, silent and white as tomb-
stones.

And then I was glad of that strange
strong rum, or whatever it was in the flask
that the shepherd gave me, for I did not
think that the mist would clear till night,
and I feared the night would be cold. So
I nearly emptied the flask; and, sooner than
I expected, I fell asleep, for the first night
out as a rule one does not sleep at once but
is kept awake some while by the little winds
and the unfamiliar sound of the things that
wander at night, and that cry to one another
far-off with their queer, faint voices; one
misses them afterwards when one gets to
houses again. But I heard none of these
sounds in the mist that evening.

And then I woke and found that the mist
was gone and the sun was just disappearing
under the moor, and I knew that I had not
slept for as long as I thought. And I de-
cided to go on while I could, for I thought
that I was not very far from the city.

I went on and on along the twisty track,
bits of the mist came down and filled the

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hollows but lifted again at once so that I
saw my way. The twilight faded as I went,
a star appeared, and I was able to see the
track no longer. I could go no further
that night, yet before I lay down to sleep I
decided to go and look over the edge of a
wide depression in the moor that I saw a
little way off. So I left the track and
walked a few hundred yards, and when I
got to the edge the hollow was full of mist
all white underneath me. Another star
appeared and a cold wind arose, and with
the wind the mist flapped away like a cur-
tain. And there was the city.

Nothing the shepherd had said was the
least untrue or even exaggerated. The
poor old man had told the simple truth,
there is not a city like it in the world. What
he had called thin spires were minarets,
but the little domes on the top were clearly
pure gold as he said. There were the mar-
ble terraces he described and the pure white
palaces covered with carving and hundreds
of minarets. The city was obviously of
the East and yet where there should have
been crescents on the domes of the min-
arets there were golden suns with rays, and

The Last Book of Wonder

wherever one looked one saw things that
obscured its origin. I walked down to it,
and, passing through a wicket gate of gold
in a low wall of white marble, I entered the
city. The heather went right up to the
city's edge and beat against the marble wall
whenever the wind blew it. Lights began
to twinkle from high windows of blue glass
as I walked up the white street, beautiful
copper lanterns were lit up and let down
from balconies by silver chains, from doors
ajar came the sound of voices singing, and
then I saw the men. Their faces were
rather grey than black, and they wore beau-
tiful robes of coloured silk with hems em-
broidered with gold and some with copper,
and sometimes pacing down the marble
ways with golden baskets hung on each
side of them I saw the camels of which the
old shepherd spoke.

The people had kindly faces, but, though
they were evidently friendly to strangers,
I could not speak with them being ignorant
of their language, nor were the sounds of
the syllables they used like any language
I had ever heard: they sounded more like
grouse.

The Last Book of Wonder

When I tried to ask them by signs whence
they had come with their city they would
only point to the moon, which was bright
and full and was shining fiercely on those
marble ways till the city danced in light.
And now there began appearing one by one,
slipping softly out through windows, men
with stringed instruments in the balconies.
They were strange instruments with huge
bulbs of wood, and they played softly on
them and very beautifully, and their queer
voices softly sang to the music weird dirges
of the griefs of their native land wherever
that may be. And far off in the heart of
the city others were singing too, the sound
of it came to me wherever I roamed, not
loud enough to disturb my thoughts, but
gently turning the mind to pleasant things.
Slender carved arches of marble, as delicate
almost as lace, crossed and re-crossed the
ways wherever I went. There was none of
that hurry of which foolish cities boast,
nothing ugly or sordid so far as I could see.
I saw that it was a city of beauty and song.
I wondered how they had travelled with all
that marble, how they had laid it down on
Mallington Moor, whence they had come

The Last Book °f Wonder

and what their resources were, and deter-
mined to investigate closely next morning,
for the old shepherd had not troubled his
head to think how the city came, he had
only noted that the city was there (and of
course no one believed him, though that is
partly his fault for his dissolute ways).
But at night one can see little and I had
walked all day, so I determined to find a
place to rest in. And just as I was won-
dering whether to ask for shelter of those silk-
robed men by signs or whether to sleep out-
side the walls and enter again in the morn-
ing, I came to a great archway in one of the
marble houses with two black curtains,
embroidered below with gold, hanging across
it. Over the archway were carved appar-
ently in many tongues the words: "Here
strangers rest." In Greek, Latin and
Spanish the sentence was repeated and
there was writing also in the language that
you see on the walls of the great temples of
Egypt, and Arabic and what I took to be
early Assyrian and one or two languages I
had never seen. I entered through the
curtains and found a tesselated marble
court with golden braziers burning sleepy
40

The Last Book °f Wonder

incense swinging by chains from the roof,
all round the walls were comfortable mat-
tresses lying upon the floor covered with
cloths and silks. It must have been ten
o'clock and I was tired. Outside the music
still softly filled the streets, a man had set a
lantern down on the marble way, five or six
sat down round him, and he was sonorously
telling them a story. Inside there were
some already asleep on the beds, in the
middle of the wide court under the braziers
a woman dressed in blue was singing very
gently, she did not move, but sung on and
on, I never heard a song that was so sooth-
ing. I lay down on one of the mattresses
by the wall, which was all inlaid with
mosaics, and pulled over me some of the
cloths with their beautiful alien work, and
almost immediately my thoughts seemed part
of the song that the woman was singing in the
midst of the court under the golden braziers
that hung from the high roof, and the song
turned them to dreams, and so I fell asleep.
A small wind having arisen, I was awak-
ened by a sprig of heather that beat con-
tinually against my face. It was morning on
Mallington Moor?and the city was quite gone,

Why the Milkman
Shudders

When he Perceives the T>awn

n the Hall of the Ancient
Company of Milkmen round
the great fireplace at the end,
when the winter logs are burn-
ing and all the craft are as-
sembled they tell to-day, as
their grandfathers told before them, why
the milkman shudders when he perceives
the dawn.

When dawn comes creeping over the
edges of hills, peers through the tree trunks
making wonderful shadows, touches the
tops of tall columns of smoke going up from
awakening cottages in the valleys, and
breaks all golden over Kentish fields, when
going on tip-toe thence it comes to the walls
of London and slips all shyly up those
gloomy streets the milkman perceives it
and shudders.

The Last Book °f Wonder

A man may be a Milkman's Working
Apprentice, may know what borax is and
how to mix it, yet not for that is the story
told to bun. There are five men alone that
tell that story, five men appointed by the
Master of the Company, by whom each
place is filled as it falls vacant, and if you
do not hear it from one of them you hear
the story from none and so can never know
why the milkman shudders when he per-
ceives the dawn.

It is the way of one of these five men,
greybeards all and milkmen from infancy,
to rub his hands by the fire when the great
logs burn, and to settle himself more easily
in his chair, perhaps to sip some drink far
other than milk, then to look round to see
that none are there to whom it would not
be fitting the tale should be told and, look-
ing from face to face and seeing none but
the men of the Ancient Company, and
questioning mutely the rest of the five with
his eyes, if some of the five be there, and
receiving their permission, to cough and to
tell the tale. And a great hush falls in the
Hall of the Ancient Company, and some-
thing about the shape of the roof and the

The Last Book of Wonder

rafters makes the tale resonant all down
the hall so that the youngest hears it far
away from the fire and knows, and dreams
of the day when perhaps he will tell himself
why the milkman shudders when he per-
ceives the dawn.

Not as one tells some casual fact is it
told, nor is it commented on from man to
man, but it is told by that great fire only and
when the occasion and the stillness of the
room and the merit of the wine and the
profit of all seem to warrant it in the opinion
of the five deputed men: then does one of
them tell it, as I have said, not heralded
by any master of ceremonies but as though
it arose out of the warmth of the fire before
which his knotted hands would chance to
be; not a thing learned by rote, but told
differently by each teller, and differently
according to his mood, yet never has one of
them dared to alter its salient points, there
is none so base among the Company of
Milkmen. The Company of Powderers
for the Face know of this story and have
envied it, the Worthy Company of Chin-
Barbers, and the Company of Whiskerers;
but none have heard it in the Milkmen's

The Last Book of Wonder

Hall, through whose wall no rumour of the
secret goes, and though they have invented
tales of their own Antiquity mocks them.

This mellow story was ripe with hon-
ourable years when milkmen wore beaver
hats, its origin was still mysterious when
white smocks were the vogue, men asked
one another when Stuarts were on the
throne (and only the Ancient Company
knew the answer) why the milkman shud-
ders when he perceives the dawn. It is all
for envy of this tale's reputation that the
Company of Powderers for the Face have
invented the tale that they too tell of an
evening," Why the Dog Barks when he hears
the step of the Baker"; and because prob-
ably all men know that tale the Company
of Powderers for the Face have dared to
consider it famous. Yet it lacks mystery
and is not ancient, is not fortified with clas-
sical allusion, has no secret lore, is common
to all who care for an idle tale, and shares
with "The Wars of the Elves," the Calf-
butcher's tale, and "The Story of the
Unicorn and the Rose," which is the tale of
the Company of Horse-drivers, their obvious
inferiority.

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But unlike all these tales so new to time,
and many another that the last two cen-
turies tell, the tale that the milkmen tell
ripples wisely on, so full of quotation from
the profoundest writers, so full of recondite
allusion, so deeply tinged with all the wis-
dom of man and instructive with the ex-
perience of all times that they that hear it
in the Milkmen's Hall as they interpret
allusion after allusion and trace obscure
quotation lose idle curiosity and forget to
question why the milkman shudders when
he perceives the dawn.

You also, 0 my reader, give not yourself
up to curiosity. Consider of how many it
is the bane. Would you to gratify this tear
away the mystery from the Milkmen's Hall
and wrong the Ancient Company of Milk-
men? Would they if all the world knew it
and it became a common thing tell that tale
any more that they have told for the last
four hundred years? Rather a silence
would settle upon their hall and a universal
regret for the ancient tale and the ancient
winter evenings. And though curiosity
were a proper consideration yet even then
this is not the proper place nor this the

The Last Book °f Wonder

proper occasion for the Tale. For the
proper place is only the Milkmen's Hall and
the proper occasion only when logs burn
well and when wine has been deeply drunken,
then when the candles were burning well in
long rows down to the dimness, down to the
darkness and mystery that lie at the end of
the hallj then were you one of the Company,
and were I one of the five, would I rise from
my seat by the fireside and tell you with all
the embellishments that it has gleaned from
the ages that story that is the heirloom of
the milkmen. And the long candles would
burn lower and lower and gutter and gutter
away till they liquified in their sockets, and
draughts would blow from the shadowy
end of the hall stronger and stronger till the
shadows came after them, and still I would
hold you with that treasured story, not by
any wit of mine but all for the sake of its
glamour and the times out of which it came;
one by one the candles would flare and die
and, when all were gone, by the light of
ominous sparks when each milkman's face
looks fearful to his fellow, you would know,
as now you cannot, why the milkman
shudders when he perceives the dawn.

The Bad Old
Woman in Black

he bad old woman in black
ran down the street of the
ox-butchers.

Windows at once were
opened high up in those crazy
gables; heads were thrust out:
it was she. Then there arose the counsel
of anxious voices, calling sideways from
window to window or across to opposite
houses. Why was she there with her
sequins and bugles and old black gown?
Why had she left her dreaded house? On
what fell errand she hasted?

They watched her lean, lithe figure, and
the wind in that old black dress, and soon
she was gone from the cobbled street and
under the town's high gateway. She turned
at once to her right and was hid from the

THE BAD OLD WOMAN IN BLACK RAN DOWN THE STREET OF THE
OX-BUTCHERS

The Last Book °f Wonder

view of the houses. Then they all ran
down to their doors, and small groups
formed on the pavement; there they took
counsel together, the eldest speaking first.
Of what they had seen they said nothing,
for there was no doubt it was she; it was of
the future they spoke, and the future only.

In what notorious thing would her errand
end? What gains had tempted her out
from her fearful home? What brilliant but
sinful scheme had her genius planned?
Above all, what future evil did this portend?
Thus at first it was only questions. And
then the old grey-beards spoke, each one to
a little group; they had seen her out before,
had known her when she was younger, and
had noted the evil things that had followed
her goings: the small groups listened well
to their low and earnest voices. No one
asked questions now or guessed at her in-
famous errand, but listened only to the wise
old men who knew the things that had been,
and who told the younger men of the dooms
that had come before.

Nobody knew how many times she had
left her dreaded house; but the oldest
recounted all the times that they knew, and

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the way she had gone each time, and the
doom that had followed her going; and two
could remember the earthquake that there
was in the street of the shearers.

So were there many tales of the times
that were, told on the pavement near the
old green doors by the edge of the cobbled
street, and the experience that the aged
men had bought with their white hairs
might be had cheap by the young. But
from all their experience only this was clear,
that never twice in their lives had she done
the same infamous thing, and that the same
calamity twice had never followed her
goings. Therefore it seemed that means
were doubtful and few for finding out what
thing was about to befall; and an ominous
feeling of gloom came down on the street
of the ox-butchers. And in the gloom
grew fears of the very worst. This comfort
they only had when they put their fear into
words — that the doom that followed her
goings had never yet been anticipated.
One feared that „ with magic she meant to
move the moon; and he would have dammed
the high tide on the neighbouring coast,
knowing that as the moon attracted the sea

The Last Book °f Wonder

the sea must attract the moon, and hoping
by his device to humble her spells. An-
other would have fetched iron bars and
clamped them across the street, remember-
ing the earthquake there was in the street
of the shearers. Another would have hon-
oured his household gods, the little cat-
faced idols seated above his hearth, gods to
whom magic was no unusual thing, and,
having paid their fees and honoured them
well, would have put the whole case before
them. His scheme found favour with many,
and yet at last was rejected, for others ran
indoors and brought out their gods too, to
be honoured, till there was a herd of gods
all seated there on the pavement; yet
would they have honoured them and put
their case before them but that a fat man
ran up last of all, carefully holding under a
reverent arm his own two hound-faced gods,
though he knew well — as, indeed, all men
must — that they were notoriously at war
with the little cat-faced idols. And al-
though the animosities natural to faith had
all been lulled by the crisis, yet a look of
anger had come in the cat-like faces that no
one dared disregard, and all perceived that

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if they stayed a moment longer there would
be flaming around them the jealousy of the
gods; so each man hastily took his idols
home, leaving the fat man insisting that his
hound-faced gods should be honoured.

Then were there schemes again and voices
raised in debate, and many new dangers
feared and new plans made.

But in the end they made no defence
against danger, for they knew not what it
would be, but wrote upon parchment as a
warning and in order that all might know:
"The bad old woman in black ran down the
street of the ox-butchers."

The Bird of the
Difficult Eye

:>servant men and women that
mow their Bond Street well
ll appreciate my astonish-
ment when in a jewellers' shop
perceived that nobody was
'urtively watching me. Not
only this but when I even picked up a little
carved crystal to examine it no shop-assist-
ants crowded round me. I walked the
whole length of the shop, still no one politely
followed.

Seeing from this that some extraordinary
revolution had occurred in the jewelry bus-
iness I went with my curiosity well aroused
to a queer old person half demon and half
man who has an idol-shop in a byway of
the City and who keeps me informed of
affairs of the Edge of the World. And
briefly over a pinch of heather incense that

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he takes by way of snuff he gave me this tre-
mendous information: that Mr. Neepy
Thang the son of Thangobrind had returned
from the Edge of the World and was even
now in London.

The information may not appear tre-
mendous to those unacquainted with the
source of jewelry; but when I say that the
only thief employed by any West-end
jeweller since famous Thangobrind's dis-
tressing doom is this same Neepy Thang,
and that for lightness of fingers and swift-
ness of stockinged foot they have none
better in Paris, it will be understood why
the Bond-street jewellers no longer cared
what became of their old stock.

There were big diamonds in London that
summer and a few considerable sapphires.
In certain astounding kingdoms behind
the East strange sovereigns missed from
their turbans the heirlooms of ancient wars,
and here and there the keepers of crown
jewels who had not heard the stockinged feet
of Thang, were questioned and died slowly.

And the jewellers gave a little dinner to
Thang at the Hotel Great Magnificent; the
windows had not been opened for five years

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and there was wine at a guinea a bottle that
you could not tell from champagne and
cigars at half a crown with a Havana label.
Altogether it was a splendid evening for
Thang.

But I have to tell of a far sadder thing
than a dinner at a hotel. The public
require jewelry and jewelry must be ob-
tained. I have to tell of Neepy Thang's
last journey.

That year the fashion was emeralds. A
man named Green had recently crossed the
Channel on a bicycle and the jewellers said
that a green stone would be particularly
appropriate to commemorate the event and
recommended emeralds.

Now a certain money-lender of Cheapside
who had just been made a peer had divided
his gains into three equal parts; one for the
purchase of the peerage, country-house and
park, and the twenty thousand pheasants
that are absolutely essential, and one for the
upkeep of the position, while the third he
banked abroad, partly to cheat the native tax-
gatherer and partly because it seemed to
him that the days of the Peerage were few
and that he might at any moment be called

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upon to start afresh elsewhere. In the
upkeep of the position he included jew-
ellry for his wife and so it came about that
Lord Castlenorman placed an order with two
well-known Bond-street jewellers named
Messrs. Grosvenor and Campbell to the ex-
tent of £100,000 for a few reliable emeralds.

But the emeralds in stock were mostly
small and shop-soiled and Neepy Thang
had to set out at once before he had had as
much as a week in London. I will briefly
sketch his project. Not many knew it,
for where the form of business is blackmail
the fewer creditors you have the better
(which of course in various degrees applies
at all times).

On the shores of the risky seas of Shiroora
Shan grows one tree only so that upon its
branches if anywhere in the world there
must build its nest the Bird of the Difficult
Eye. Neepy Thang had come by this in-
formation, which was indeed the truth,
that if the bird migrated to Fairyland before
the three eggs hatched out they would un-
doubtedly all turn into emeralds, while if they
hatched out first it would be a bad business.

When he had mentioned these eggs to

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Messrs. Grosvenor and Campbell they had
said, "The very thing": they were men of
few words, in English, for it was not their
native tongue.

So Neepy Thang set out. He bought
the purple ticket at Victoria Station. He
went by Herne Hill, Bromley and Bickley
and passed St. Mary Cray. At Eynsford
he changed and taking a footpath along a
winding valley went wandering into the
hills. And at the top of a hill in a little
wood, where all the anemones long since
were over and the perfume of mint and
thyme from outside came drifting in with
Thang, he found once more the familiar
path, age-old and fair as wonder, that leads
to the Edge of the World. Little to him
were its sacred memories that are one with
the secret of earth, for he was out on bus-
iness, and little would they be to me if I
ever put them on paper. Let it suffice
that he went down that path going further
and further from the fields we know, and all
the way he muttered to himself, "What if
the eggs hatch out and it be a bad business ! "
The glamour that is at all times upon those
lonely lands that lie at the back of the

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chalky hills of Kent intensified as he went
upon his journeys. Queerer and queerer
grew the things that he saw by little World-
End Path. Many a twilight descended
upon that journey with all their mysteries,
many a blaze of stars; many a morning came
flaming up to a tinkle of silvern horns; till
the outpost elves of Fairyland came in sight
and the glittering crests of Fairyland's three
mountains betokened the journey's end.
And so with painful steps (for the shores of
the world are covered with huge crystals)
he came to the risky seas of Shiroora Shan
and saw them pounding to gravel the
wreckage of fallen stars, saw them and
heard their roar, those shipless seas that
between earth and the fairies' homes
heave beneath some huge wind that is
none of our four. And there in the dark-
ness on the grizzly coast, for darkness
was swooping slantwise down the sky as
though with some evil purpose, there stood
that lonely, gnarled and deciduous tree.
It was a bad place to be found in after
dark, and night descended with multitudes
of stars, beasts prowling in the blackness
gluttered * at Neepy Thang. And there on

* See any dictionary, but in vain.
58

THERE STOOD THAT LONELY, GNARLED AND DECIDUOUS TREE

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a lower branch within easy reach he clearly
saw the Bird of the Difficult Eye sitting
upon the nest for which she is famous. Her
face was towards those three inscrutable
mountains, far-off on the other side of the
risky seas, whose hidden valleys are Fairy-
land. Though not yet autumn in the fields
we know, it was close on mid-winter here,
the moment as Thang knew well when those
eggs hatch out. Had he miscalculated and
arrived a minute too late? Yet the bird
was even now about to migrate, her pinions
fluttered and her gaze was to ward Fairy land.
Thang hoped and muttered a prayer to those
pagan gods whose spite and vengeance he
had most reason to fear. It seems that it
was too late or a prayer too small to placate
them, for there and then the stroke of mid-
winter came and the eggs hatched out in
the roar of Shiroora Shan or ever the bird
was gone with her difficult eye and it was a
bad business indeed for Neepy Thang; I
haven't the heart to tell you any more.

"'Ere," said Lord Castlenorman some
few weeks later to Messrs. Grosvenor and
Campbell, "you aren't 'arf taking your
time about those emeralds."

The Long

Porter's Tale

here are things that are known
only to the long porter of
Tong Tong Tarrup as he sits
and mumbles memories to
himself in the little bastion
gateway.

He remembers the war there was in the
halls of the gnomes; and how the fairies
came for the opals once, which Tong Tong
Tarrup has; and the way that the giants
went through the fields below, he watching
from his gateway: he remembers quests that
are even yet a wonder to the gods. Who
dwells in those frozen houses on the high
bare brink of the world not even he has told
me, and he is held to be garrulous. Among
the elves, the only living things ever seen
moving at that awful altitude where they
quarry turquoise on Earth's highest crag,

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his name is a byword for loquacity where-
with they mock the talkative.

His favourite story if you offer him bash
— the drug of which he is fondest, and for
which he will give his service in war to the
elves against the goblins, or vice -versa if the
goblins bring him more — his favourite
story, when bodily soothed by the drug and
mentally fiercely excited, tells of a quest
undertaken ever so long ago for nothing
more marketable than an old woman's song.

Picture him telling it. An old man,
lean and bearded, and almost monstrously
long, that lolled in a city's gateway on a
crag perhaps ten miles high; the houses for
the most part facing eastward, lit by the
sun and moon and the constellations we
know, but one house on the pinnacle look-
ing over the edge of the world and lit by the
glimmer of those unearthly spaces where
one long evening wears away the stars: my
little offering of bash; a long forefinger that
nipped it at once on a stained and greedy
thumb — all these are in the foreground of
the picture. In the background, the mys-
tery of those silent houses and of not know-
ing who their denizens were, or what service

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they had at the hands of the long porter and
what payment he had in return, and whether
he was mortal.

Picture him in the gateway of this incred-
ible town, having swallowed my bash in
silence, stretch his great length, lean back,
and begin to speak.

It seems that one clear morning a hundred
years ago, a visitor to Tong Tong Tarrup
was climbing up from the world. He had
already passed above the snow and had set
his foot on a step of the earthward stairway
that goes down from Tong Tong Tarrup on
to the rocks, when the long porter saw him.
And so painfully did he climb those easy
steps that the grizzled man on watch had
long to wonder whether or not the stranger
brought him bash, the drug that gives a
meaning to the stars and seems to explain
the twilight. And in the end there was not
a scrap of bash, and the stranger had noth-
ing better to offer that grizzled man than
his mere story only.

It seems that the stranger's name was
Gerald Jones, and he always lived in Lon-
don; but once as a child he had been on a
Northern moor. It was so long ago that he

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did not remember how, only somehow or
other he walked alone on the moor, and all
the ling was in flower. There was nothing
in sight but ling and heather and bracken,
except, far off near the sunset, on indistinct
hills, there were little vague patches that
looked like the fields of men. With eve-
ning a mist crept up and hid the hills, and
still he went walking on over the moor.
And then he came to the valley, a tiny val-
ley in the midst of the moor, whose sides
were incredibly steep. He lay down and
looked at it through the roots of the ling.
And a long, long way below him, in a garden
by a cottage, with hollyhocks all round her
that were taller than herself, there sat an
old woman on a wooden chair, singing in
the evening. And the man had taken a
fancy to the song and remembered it after
in London, and whenever it came to his mind
it made him think of evenings — the kind
you don't get in London — and he heard a
soft wind again going idly over the moor
and the bumble-bees in a hurry, and forgot
the noise of the traffic. And always, when-
ever he heard men speak of Time, he
grudged to Time most this song. Once

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afterwards he went to that Northern moor
again and found the tiny valley, but there
was no old woman in the garden, and no one
was singing a song. And either regret for
the song that the old woman had sung, on
a summer evening twenty years away and
daily receding, troubled his mind, or else the
wearisome work that he did in London, for
he worked for a great firm that was per-
fectly useless; and he grew old early, as men
do in cities. And at last, when melancholy
brought only regret and the uselessness of
his work gained ground with age, he decided
to consult a magician. So to a magician he
went and told him his troubles, and partic-
ularly he told him how he had heard the
song. "And now," he said, "it is nowhere
in the world."

"Of course it is not in the world," the
magician said, "but over the Edge of the
World you may easily find it." And he
told the man that he was suffering from flux
of time and recommended a day at the Edge
of the World. Jones asked what part of
the Edge of the World he should go to, and
the magician had heard Tong Tong Tarrup
well spoken of; so he paid him, as is usual,

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in opals, and started at once on the journey.
The ways to that town are winding; he took
the ticket at Victoria Station that they only
give if they know you: he went past Bleth:
he went along the Hills of Neol-Hungar and
came to the Gap of Poy. All these are in
that part of the world that pertains to the
fields we know; but beyond the Gap of Poy
on those ordinary plains, that so closely
resemble Sussex, one first meets the unlikely.
A line of common grey hills, the Hills of
Sneg, may be seen at the edge of the plain
from the Gap of Poy; it is there that the
incredible begins, infrequently at first, but
happening more and more as you go up the
hills. For instance, descending once into
Poy Plains, the first thing that I saw was an
ordinary shepherd watching a flock of ordi-
nary sheep. I looked at them for some
time and nothing happened, when, without
a word, one of the sheep walked up to the
shepherd and borrowed his pipe and smoked
it — an incident that struck me as unlikely;
but in the Hills of Sneg I met an honest
politician. Over these plains went Jones
and over the Hills of Sneg, meeting at first
unlikely things, and then incredible things,

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till he came to the long slope beyond the
hills that leads up to the Edge of the World,
and where, as all guide-books tell, anything
may happen. You might at the foot of this
slope see here and there things that could
conceivably occur in the fields we know;
but soon these disappeared, and the trav-
eller saw nothing but fabulous beasts,
browsing on flowers as astounding as them-
selves, and rocks so distorted that their
shapes had clearly a meaning, being too
startling to be accidental. Even the trees
were shockingly unfamiliar, they had so
much to say, and they leant over to one an-
other whenever they spoke and struck gro-
tesque attitudes and leered. Jones saw
two fir-trees fighting. The effect of these
scenes on his nerves was very severe; still
he climbed on, and was much cheered at last
by the sight of a primrose, the only familiar
thing he had seen for hours, but it whistled
and skipped away. He saw the unicorns in
their secret valley. Then night in a sin-
ister way slipped over the sky, and there
shone not only the stars, but lesser and
greater moons, and he heard dragons rat-
tling in the dark.

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With dawn there appeared above him among
its amazing crags the town of Tong Tong
Tarrup, with the light on its frozen stairs,
a tiny cluster of houses far up in the sky.
He was on the steep mountain now: great
mists were leaving it slowly, and revealing,
as they trailed away, more and more aston-
ishing things. Before the mist had all gone
he heard quite near him, on what he had
thought was bare mountain, the sound of a
heavy galloping on turf. He had come to
the plateau of the centaurs. And all at once
he saw them in the mist: there they were,
the children of fable, five enormous centaurs.
Had he paused on account of any astonish-
ment he had not come so far: he strode on
over the plateau, and came quite near to the
centaurs. It is never the centaurs' wont to
notice men; they pawed the ground and
shouted to one another in Greek, but they
said no word to him. Nevertheless they
turned and stared at him when he left them,
and when he had crossed the plateau and
still went on, all five of them cantered after
to the edge of their green land; for above
the high green plateau of the centaurs is
nothing but naked mountain, and the last

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green thing that is seen by the mountaineer
as he travels to Tong Tong Tarrup is the
grass that the centaurs trample. He came
into the snow fields that the mountain
wears like a cape, its head being bare above
it, and still climbed on. The centaurs
watched him with increasing wonder.

Not even fabulous beasts were near him
now, nor strange demoniac trees — nothing
but snow and the clean bare crag above it
on which was Tong Tong Tarrup. All day
he climbed and evening found him above
the snow-line; and soon he came to the stair-
way cut in the rock and in sight of that
grizzled man, the long porter of Tong Tong
Tarrup, sitting mumbling amazing mem-
ories to himself and expecting in vain from
the stranger a gift of bash.

It seems that as soon as the stranger
arrived at the bastion gateway, tired though
he was, he demanded lodgings at once that
commanded a good view of the Edge of the
World. But the long porter, that grizzled
man, disappointed of his bash, demanded
the stranger's story to add to his memories
before he would show him the way. And
this is the story, if the long porter has told

'68

The Last Book °f Wonder

me the truth and if his memory is still what
it was. And when the story was told, the
grizzled man arose, and, dangling his musi-
cal keys, went up through door after door
and by many stairs and led the stranger to
the top-most house, the highest roof in the
world, and in its parlour showed him the
parlour window. There the tired stranger
sat down in a chair and gazed out of the
window sheer over the Edge of the World.
The window was shut, and in its glittering
panes the twilight of World's Edge blazed
and danced, partly like glow-worms' lamps
and partly like the sea; it went by rippling,
full of wonderful moons. But the traveller
did not look at the wonderful moons. For
from the abyss there grew with their roots
in far constellations a row of hollyhocks,
and amongst them a small green garden
quivered and trembled as scenes tremble in
water; higher up, ling in bloom was floating
upon the twilight, more and more floated
up till all the twilight was purple; the little
green garden low down was hung in the
midst of it. And the garden down below,
and the ling all round it, seemed all to be
trembling and drifting on a song. For the

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twilight was full of a song that sang and rang
along the edges of the World, and the green
garden and the ling seemed to flicker and
ripple with it as the song rose and fell, and
an old woman was singing it down in the
garden. A bumble-bee sailed across from
over the Edge of the World. And the song
that was lapping there against the coasts
of the World, and to which the stars were
dancing, was the same that he had heard
the old woman sing long since down in the
valley in the midst of the Northern moor.

But that grizzled man, the long porter,
would not let the stranger stay, because he
brought him no bash, and impatiently he
shouldered him away, himself not troubling
to glance through the World's outermost
window, for the lands that Time afflicts and
the spaces that Time knows not are all one
to that grizzled man, and the bash that he
eats more profoundly astounds his mind
than anything man can show him either in
the World we know or over the Edge. And,
bitterly protesting, the traveller went back
and down again to the World.

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Accustomed as I am to the incredible
from knowing the Edge of the World, the
story presents difficulties to me. Yet it
may be that the devastation wrought by
Time is merely local, and that outside the
scope of his destruction old songs are still
being sung by those that we deem dead. I
try to hope so. And yet the more I investi-
gate the story that the long porter told me
in the town of Tong Tong Tarrup the more
plausible the alternative theory appears —
that that grizzled man is a liar.

The Loot of Loma

oming back laden with the
loot of Loma, the four tall
men looked earnestly to the
right; to the left they durst
not, for the precipice there
that had been with them so
long went sickly down on to a bank of
clouds, and how much further below that
only their fears could say.

Loma lay smoking, a city of ruin, behind
them, all its defenders dead; there was no
one left to pursue them, and yet their
Indian instincts told them that all was
scarcely well. They had gone three days
along that narrow ledge: mountain quite
smooth, incredible, above them, and preci-
pice as smooth and as far below. It was
chilly there in the mountains; at night a
stream or a wind in the gloom of the chasm

THEY HAD GONE THREE DAYS ALONG THAT NARROW LEDGE

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below them went like a whisper; the stillness
of all things else began to wear the nerve —
an enemy's howl would have braced them;
they began to wish their perilous path were
wider, they began to wish that they had not
sacked Loma.

Had that path been any wider the sacking
of Loma must indeed have been harder for
them, for the citizens must have fortified
the city but that the awful narrowness of
that ten-league pass of the hills had made
their crag-surrounded city secure. And at
last an Indian had said, "Come, let us sack
it." Grimly they laughed in the wigwams.
Only the eagles, they said, had ever seen it,
its hoard of emeralds and its golden gods;
and one had said he would reach it, and they
answered, "Only the eagles."

It was Laughing Face who said it, and
who gathered thirty braves and led them
into Loma with their tomahawks and their
bows; there were only four left now, but
they had the loot of Loma on a mule. They
had four golden gods, a hundred emeralds,
fifty-two rubies, a large silver gong, two
sticks of malachite with amethyst handles
for holding incense at religious feasts, four

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beakers one foot high, each carved from a
rose-quartz crystal; a little coffer carved
out of two diamonds, and (had they but
known it) the written curse of a priest. It
was written on parchment in an unknown
tongue, and had been slipped in with the
loot by a dying hand.

From either end of that narrow, terrible
ledge the third night was closing in; it was
dropping down on them from the heights of
the mountain and slipping up to them out of
the abyss, the third night since Loma blazed
and they had left it. Three more days of
tramping should bring them in triumph
home, and yet their instincts said that all
was scarcely well. We who sit at home and
draw the blinds and shut the shutters as
soon as night appears, who gather round the
fire when the wind is wild, who pray at
regular seasons and in familiar shrines,
know little of the demoniac look of night
when it is filled with curses of false, infuriated
gods. Such a night was this. Though in
the heights the fleecy clouds were idle, yet
the wind was stirring mournfully in the
abyss and moaning as it stirred, unhappily
at first and full of sorrow; but as day turned

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away from that awful path a very definite
menace entered its voice which fast grew
louder and louder, and night came on with
a long howl. Shadows repeatedly passed
over the stars, and then a mist fell swiftly,
as though there were something suddenly
to be done and utterly to be hidden, as in
very truth there was.

And in the chill of that mist the four tall
men prayed to their totems, the whimsical
wooden figures that stood so far away,
watching the pleasant wigwams; the fire-
light even now would be dancing over their
faces, while there would come to their ears
delectable tales of war. They halted upon
the pass and prayed, and waited for any sign.
For a man's totem may be in the likeness
perhaps of an otter, and a man may pray,
and if his totem be placable and watching
over his man a noise may be heard at once
like the noise that the otter makes, though
it be but a stone that falls on another stone;
and the noise is a sign. The four men's
totems that stood so far away were in the
likeness of the coney, the bear, the heron,
and the lizard. They waited, and no sign
came. With all the noises of the wind in

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the abyss, no noise was like the thump that
the coney makes, nor the bear's growl, nor
the heron's screech, nor the rustle of the
lizard in the reeds.

It seemed that the wind was saying some-
thing over and over again, and that that
thing was evil. They prayed again to their
totems, and no sign came. And then they
knew that there was some power that night
that was prevailing against the pleasant
carvings on painted poles of wood with the
firelight on their faces so far away. Now
it was clear that the wind was saying some-
thing, some very, very dreadful thing in a
tongue that they did not know. They
listened, but they could not tell what it said.
Nobody could have said from seeing their
faces how much the four tall men desired
the wigwams again, desired the camp-fire
and the tales of war and the benignant
totems that listened and smiled in the dusk:
Nobody could have seen how well they
knew that this was no common night or
wholesome mist.

When at last no answer came nor any
sign from their totems, they pulled out of
the bag those golden gods that Loma gave

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not up except in flames and when all her
men were dead. They had large ruby eyes
and emerald tongues. They set them down
upon that mountain pass, the cross-legged
idols with their emerald tongues; and having
placed between them a few decent yards, as
it seemed meet there should be between
gods and men, they bowed them down and
prayed in their desperate straits in that
dank, ominous night to the gods they had
wronged, for it seemed that there was a
vengeance upon the hills and that they
would scarce escape, as the wind knew well.
And the gods laughed, all four, and wagged
their emerald tongues; the Indians saw
them, though the night had fallen and
though the mist was low. The four tall
men leaped up at once from their knees and
would have left the gods upon the pass but
that they feared some hunter of their tribe
might one day find them and say of Laugh-
ing Face, "He fled and left behind his
golden gods," and sell the gold and come
with his wealth to the wigwams and be
greater than Laughing Face and his three
men. And then they would have cast the
gods away, down the abyss, with their eyes

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and their emerald tongues, but they knew
that enough already they had wronged
Loma's gods, and feared that vengeance
enough was waiting them on the hills. So
they packed them back in the bag on the
frightened mule, the bag that held the curse
they knew nothing of, and so pushed on
into the menacing night. Till midnight
they plodded on and would not sleep;
grimmer and grimmer grew the look of the
night, and the wind more full of meaning,
and the mule knew and trembled, and it
seemed that the wind knew, too, as did the
instincts of those four tall men, though
they could not reason it out, try how they
would.

And though the squaws waited long
where the pass winds out of the mountains,
near where the wigwams are upon the
plains, the wigwams and the totems and the
fire, and though they watched by day, and
for many nights uttered familiar calls, still
did they never see those four tall men
emerge out of the mountains any more, even
though they prayed to their totems upon
their painted poles; but the curse in the

The Last Book of Wonder

mystical writing that they had unknown in
their bag worked there on that lonely pass
six leagues from the ruins of Loma, and
nobody can tell us what it was. f

The Secret of the Sea

!n an ill-lit ancient tavern that
II know, are many tales of the
jsea; but not without the wine
)of Gorgondy, that I had of a
(private bargain from the
'gnomes, was the tale laid bare
for which I had waited of an evening for the
greater part of a year.

I knew my man and listened to his stories,
sitting amid the bluster of his oaths; I plied
him with rum and whiskey and mixed drinks,
but there never came the tale for which I
sought, and as a last resort I went to the
Huthneth Mountains and bargained there
all night with the chiefs of the gnomes.

When I came to the ancient tavern and
entered the low-roofed room, bringing the
hoard of the gnomes in a bottle of hammered
iron, my man had not yet arrived. The

The Last Book °f Wonder

sailors laughed at my old iron bottle, but I
sat down and waited; had I opened it then
they would have wept and sung. I was
well content to wait, for I knew my man had
the story, and it was such a one as had pro-
foundly stirred the incredulity of the faith-
less.

He entered and greeted me, and sat down
and called for brandy. He was a hard man
to turn from his purpose, arid, uncorking
my iron bottle, I sought to dissuade him
from brandy for fear that when the brandy,
bit his throat he should refuse to leave it
for any other wine. He lifted his head and
said deep and dreadful things of any man
that should dare to speak against brandy,

I swore that I said nothing against brandy
but added that it was often given to chil-
dren, while Gorgondy was only drunk by
men of such depravity that they had aban-
doned sin because all the usual vices had
come to seem genteel. When he asked if
Gorgondy was a bad wine to drink I said
that it was so bad that if a man sipped it
that was the one touch that made damna-
tion certain. Then he asked me what I
had in the iron bottle, and I said it was

The Last Book °f Wonder

Gorgondy; and then he shouted for the
largest tumbler in that ill-lit ancient tavern,
and stood up and shook his fist at me when
it came, and swore, and told me to fill it
with the wine that I got on that bitter night
from the treasure house of the gnomes.

As he drank it he told me that he had
met men who had spoken against wine, and
that they had mentioned Heaven; and there-
fore he would not go there — no, not he;
and that once he had sent one of them to
Hell, but when he got there he would turn
him out, and he had no use for milksops.

Over the second tumbler he was thought-
ful, but still he said no word of the tale he
knew, until I feared that it would never be
heard. But when the third glass of that
terrific wine had burned its way down his
gullet, and vindicated the wickedness of
the gnomes, his reticence withered like a
leaf in the fire, and he bellowed out the
secret.

I had long known that there is in ships a
will or way of their own, and had even
suspected that when sailors die or abandon
their ships at sea, a derelict, being left to
her own devices, may seek her own ends;

The Last Book of Wonder

but I had never dreamed by night, or fan-
cied during the day, that the ships had a
god that they worshipped, or that they
secretly slipped away to a temple in the sea.

Over the fourth glass of the wine that the
gnomes so sinfully brew but have kept so
wisely from man, until the bargain that I
had with their elders all through that
autumn night, the sailor told me the story.
I do not tell it as he told it to me because of
the oaths that were in it; nor is it from del-
icacy that I refrain from writing these oaths
verbatim, but merely because the horror
they caused in me at the time troubles me
still whenever I put them on paper, and I
continue to shudder until I have blotted
them out. Therefore, I tell the story in
my own words, which, if they possess a
certain decency that was not in the mouth'
of that sailor, unfortunately do not smack,
as his did, of rum and blood and the sea.

You would take a ship to be a dead thing
like a table, as dead as bits of iron and can-
vas and wood. That is because you always
live on shore, and have never seen the sea,
and drink milk. Milk is a more accursed
drink than water.

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What with the captain and what with the
man at the wheel, and what with the crew,
a ship has no fair chance of showing a will
of her own.

There is only one moment in the history
of ships, that carry crews on board, when
they act by their own free will. This
moment comes when all the crew are drunk.
As the last man falls drunk on to the deck,
the ship is free of man, and immediately
slips away. She slips away at once on
a new course and is never one yard out in
a hundred miles.

It was like this one night with the Sea-
Fancy. Bill Smiles was there himself, and
can vouch for it. Bill Smiles has never
told this tale before for fear that anyone
should call him a liar. Nobody dislikes
being hung as much as Bill Smiles would,
but he won't be called a liar. I tell the tale
as I heard it, relevancies and irrelevancies,
though in' my more decent words; and as I
made no doubts of the truth of it then, I
hardly like to now; others can please them-
selves.

It is not often that the whole of a crew is
drunk. The crew of the Sea-Fancy was no

The Last Book °f Wonder

drunkener than others. It happened like this.

The captain was always drunk. One day
a fancy he had that some spiders were
plotting against him, or a sudden bleeding
he had from both his ears, made him think
that drinking might be bad for his health.
Next day he signed the pledge. He was
sober all that morning and all the afternoon,
but at evening he saw a sailor drinking a
a glass of beer, and a fit of madness seized
him, and he said things that seemed bad to
Bill Smiles. And next morning he made all
of them take the pledge.

For two days nobody had a drop to
drink, unless you count water, and on the
third morning the captain was quite drunk
It stood to reason they all had a glass or two
then, except the man at the wheel; and to-
wards evening the man at the wheel could
bear it no longer, and seems to have had his
glass like all the rest, for the ship's course
wobbled a bit and made a circle or two.
Then all of a sudden she went off south by
east under full canvas till midnight, and
never altered her course. And at midnight
she came to the wide wet courts of the
Temple in the Sea.

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People who think that Mr. Smiles is
drunk often make a great mistake. And
people are not the only ones that have made
that mistake. Once a ship made it, and a
lot of ships. It's a mistake to think that
old Bill Smiles is drunk just because he
can't move.

Midnight and moonlight and the Temple
in the Sea Bill Smiles clearly remembers,
and all the derelicts in the world were there,
the old abandoned ships. The figureheads
were nodding to themselves and blinking
at the image. The image was a woman of
white marble on a pedestal in the outer
court of the Temple of the Sea: she was
clearly the love of all the man-deserted
ships, or the goddess to whom they prayed
their heathen prayers. And as Bill Smiles
was watching them, the lips of the figure-
heads moved; they all began to pray. But
all at once their lips were closed with a snap
when they saw that there were men on the
Sea-Fancy. They all came crowding up
and nodded and nodded and nodded to see
if all were drunk, and that's when they
made their mistake about old Bill Smiles,
although he couldn't move. They would

MIDNIGHT AND MOONLIGHT AND THE TEMPLE IN THE SEA

The Last Book °f Wonder

have given up the treasuries of the gulfs
sooner than let men hear the prayers they
said or guess their love for the goddess. It
is the intimate secret of the sea.

The sailor paused. And, in my eager-
ness to hear what lyrical or blasphemous
thing those figureheads prayed by moon-
light at midnight in the sea to the woman
of marble who was a goddess to ships, I
pressed on the sailor more of my Gorgondy
wine that the gnomes so wickedly brew.

I should never have done it; but there he
was sitting silent while the secret was almost
mine. He took it moodily and drank a
glass; and with the other glasses that he had
had he fell a prey to the villainy of the
gnomes who brew this unbridled wine to no
good end. His body leaned forward slowly,
then fell on to the table, his face being side-
ways and full of a wicked smile, and, saying
very clearly the one word, "Hell," he be-
came silent for ever with the secret he had
from the sea.

How AH Came
to the Black Country

looshan the barber went to
3hep the maker of teeth to
liscuss the state of England.
They agreed that it was time
send for Ali.

So Shooshan stepped late
that night from the little shop near Fleet
Street and made his way back again to his
house in the ends of London and sent at
once the message that brought Ali.

And Ali came, mostly on foot, from the
country of Persia, and it took him a year
to come; but when he came he was welcome.
And Shep told Ali what was the matter
with England and Shooshan swore that it
was so, and Ali looking out of the window
of the little shop near Fleet Street beheld
the ways of London and audibly blessed
King Solomon and his seal,

The Last Book °

When Shep and Shooshan heard the
names of King Solomon and his seal both
asked, as they had scarcely dared before,
if Ali had it. Ali patted a little bundle of
silks that he drew from his inner raiment.
It was there.

Now concerning the movements and
courses of the stars and the influence on
them of spirits of Earth and devils this age
has been rightly named by some The Second
Age of Ignorance. But Ali knew. And
by watching nightly, for seven nights in
Bagdad, the way of certain stars he had
found out the dwelling place of Him they
Needed.

Guided by Ali all three set forth for the
Midlands. And by the reverence that was
manifest in the faces of Shep and Shooshan
towards the person of Ali, some knew what
Ali carried, while others said that it was the
tablets of the Law, others the name of God,
and others that he must have a lot of money
about him. So they passed Slod and
Apton.

And at last they came to the town for
which Ali sought, that spot over which he
had seen the shy stars wheel and swerve

The Last Book of Wonder

away from their orbits, being troubled.
Verily when they came there were no stars,
though it was midnight. And Ali said that
it was the appointed place. In harems in
Persia in the evening when the tales go
round it is still told how Ali and Shep and
Shooshan came to the Black country.

When it was dawn they looked upon the
country and saw how it was without doubt
the appointed place, even as Ali had said,
for the earth had been taken out of pits and
burned and left lying in heaps, and there
were many factories, and they stood over
the town and as it were rejoiced. And
with one voice Shep and Shooshan gave
praise to Ali.

And Ali said that the great ones of the
place must needs be gathered together, and
to this end Shep and Shooshan went into
the town and there spoke craftily. For
they said that Ali had of his wisdom con-
trived as it were a patent and a novelty
which should greatly benefit England. And
when they heard how he sought nothing for
his novelty save only to benefit mankind
they consented to speak with Ali and see his
novelty. And they came forth and met Ali.

GUIDED BY ALI, ALL THREE SET FORTH FOR THE MIDLANDS

The Last Book of Wonder

And Ali spake and said unto them:"O
lords of this place; in the book that all men
know it is written how that a fisherman
casting his net into the sea drew up a bottle
of brass, and when he took the stopper from
the bottle a dreadful genie of horrible aspect
rose from the bottle, as it were like a smoke,
even to darkening the sky, whereat the
fisherman ..." And the great ones
of that place said: "We have heard the
story." And Ali said: "What became of
that genie after he was safely thrown back
into the sea is not properly spoken of by any
save those that pursue the study of demons
and not with certainty by any man, but
that the stopper that bore the ineffable seal
and bears it to this day became separate
from the bottle is among those things that
man may know.'/ And when there was
doubt among the great ones Ali drew forth
his bundle and one by one removed those
many silks till the seal stood revealed; and
some of them knew it for the seal and others
knew it not.

And they looked curiously at it and lis-
tened to Ali, and Ali said :

"Having heard how evil is the case of

The Last Book °f Wonder

England, how a smoke has darkened the
country, and in places (as men say) the
grass is black, and how even yet your fac-
tories multiply, and haste and noise have
become such that men have no time for
song, I have therefore come at the bidding
of my good friend Shooshan, barber of
London, and of Shep, a maker of teeth, to
make things well with you."

And they said: "But where is your patent
and your novelty?"

And Ali said: "Have I not here the
stopper and on it, as good men know, the
ineffable seal? Now I have learned in
Persia how that your trains that make the
haste, and hurry men to and fro, and your
factories and the digging of your pits and
all the things that are evil are every one of
them caused and brought about by steam."

"Is it not so?" said Shooshan.

"It is even so," said Shep.

"Now it is clear," said Ali, "that the chief
devil that vexes England and has done all
this harm, who herds men into cities and
will not let them rest, is even the devil
Steam."

Then the great ones would have rebuked

The Last Book of Wonder

him but one said: "No, let us hear him,
perhaps his patent may improve on steam."

And to them hearkening Ali went on
thus: "0 Lords of this place, let there be
made a bottle of strong steel, for I have no
bottle with my stopper, and this being done
let all the factories, trains, digging of pits,
and all evil things soever that may be done
by steam be stopped for seven days, and the
men that tend them shall go free, but the
steel bottle for my stopper I will leave open
in a likely place. Now that chief devil,
Steam, finding no factories to enter into,
nor no trains, sirens nor pits prepared for
him, and being curious and accustomed to
steel pots, will verily enter one night into
the bottle that you shall make for my stop-
per, and I shall spring forth from my hiding
with my stopper and fasten him down with
the ineffable seal which is the seal of King
Solomon and deliver him up to you that you
cast him into the sea."

And the great ones answered Ali and they
said: "But what should we gain if we lose
our prosperity and be no longer rich? "

And Ali said: "When we have cast this
devil into the sea there will come back

The Last Book of Wonder

again the woods and ferns and all the beau-
tiful things that the world hath, the little
leaping hares shall be seen at play, there
shall be music on the hills again, and at twi-
light ease and quiet and after the twilight
stars."

And "Verily," said Shooshan, "there
shall be the dance again."

"Aye," said Shep, "there shall be the
country dance."

But the great ones spake and said, deny-
ing Ali: "We will make no such bottle for
your stopper nor stop our healthy factories
or good trains, nor cease from our digging
of pits nor do anything that you desire, for
an interference with steam would strike at
the roots of that prosperity that you see so
plentifully all around us."

Thus they dismissed Ali there and then
from that place where the earth was torn
up and burnt, being taken out of pits, and
where factories blazed all night with a de-
moniac glare; and they dismissed with him
both Shooshan, the barber, and Shep, the
maker of teeth: so that a week later Ali
started from Calais on his long walk back
to Persia.

The Last Book °f Wonder

And all this happened thirty years ago,
and Shep is an old man now and Shooshan
older, and many mouths have bit with the
teeth of Shep (for he has a knack of getting
them back whenever his customers die),
and they have written again to Ali away in
the country of Persia with these words,
saying:

"O Ali. The devil has indeed begotten
a devil, even that spirit Petrol. And the
young devil waxeth, and increaseth in lusti-
hood and is ten years old and becoming like
to his father. Come therefore and help us
with the ineffable seal. For there is none
like Ali."

And Ah' turns where his slaves scatter
rose-leaves, letting the letter fall, and deeply
draws from his hookah a puff of the scented
smoke, right down into his lungs, and sighs
it forth and smiles, and lolling round on to
his other elbow speaks comfortably and says,
"And shall a man go twice to the help of a
dog?"

And with these words he thinks no more
of England but ponders again the inscru-
table ways of God.

The Bureau
D 'Echange
De Maux

joften think of the Bureau
[d'Echange de Maux and the
(wondrously evil old man that
jsate therein. It stood in a
Ilittle street that there is in
*Paris, its doorway made of
three brown beams of wood, the top one
overlapping the others like the Greek letter
pi, all the rest painted green, a house far
lower and narrower than its neighbours and
infinitely stranger, a thing to take one's
fancy. And over the doorway on the old
brown beam in faded yellow letters this
legend ran, Bureau Universel d'Echanges
de Maux.

I entered at once and accosted the listless
man that lolled on a stool by his counter. I
demanded the wherefore of his wonderful
house, what evil wares he exchanged, with

The Last Book of Wonder

many other things that I wished to know,
for curiosity led me; and indeed had it not
I had gone at once from the shop, for there
was so evil a look in that fattened man, in
the hang of his fallen cheeks and his sinful
eye, that you would have said he had had
dealings with Hell and won the advantage
by sheer wickedness.

Such a man was mine host; but above all
the evil of him lay in his eyes, which lay so
still, so apathetic, that you would have
sworn that he was drugged or dead; like
lizards motionless on a wall they lay, then
suddenly they darted, and all his cunning
flamed up and revealed itself in what one
moment before seemed no more than a
sleepy and ordinary wicked old man. And
this was the object and trade of that
peculiar shop, the Bureau Universel d'E-
changes de Maux: you paid twenty francs,
which the old man proceeded to take from
me, for admission to the bureau and then
had the right to exchange any evil or mis-
fortune with anyone on the premises for
some evil or misfortune that he "could
afford," as the old man put it.

There were four or five men in the dingy

The Last Boofa °f Wonder

ends of that low-ceilinged room who gestic-
ulated and muttered softly in twos as men
who make a bargain, and now and then
more came in, and the eyes of the flabby
owner of the house leaped up at them as
they entered, seemed to know their errands
at once and each one's peculiar need, and
fell back again into somnolence, receiving
his twenty francs in an almost lifeless hand
and biting the coin as though in pure ab-
sence of mind.

"Some of my clients," he told me. So
amazing to me was the trade of this extra-
ordinary shop that I engaged the old man
in conversation, repulsive though he was,
and from his garrulity I gathered these facts.
He spoke in perfect English though his
utterance was somewhat thick and heavy;
no language seemed to come amiss to him.
He had been in business a great many years,
how many he would not say, and was far
older than he looked. All kinds of people
did business in his shop. What they ex-
changed with each other he did not care
except that it had to be evils, he was not
empowered to carry on any other kind of
business.

The Last Book of Wonder

There was no evil, he told me, that was
not negotiable there; no evil the old man
knew had ever been taken away in despair
from his shop. A man might have to wait
and come back again next day, and next
day and the day after, paying twenty francs
each time, but the old man had the addresses
of his clients and shrewdly knew their needs,
and soon the right two met and eagerly
changed their commodities. "Commodities"
was the old man's terrible word, said with a
gruesome smack of his heavy lips, for he
took a pride in his business and evils to him
were goods.

I learned from him in ten minutes very
much of human nature, more than I have
ever learned from any other man; I learned
from him that a man's own evil is to him the
worst thing that there is or could be, and
that an evil so unbalances all men's minds
that they always seek for extremes in that
small grim shop. A woman that had no
children had exchanged with an impover-
ished half -maddened creature with twelve.
On one occasion a man had exchanged wis-
dom for folly.

"Why on earth did he do that?" I said.

The Last Book of Wonder

"None of my business," the old man
answered in his heavy indolent way. He
merely took his twenty francs from each
and ratified the agreement in the little room
at the back opening out of the shop where
his clients do business. Apparently the
man that had parted with wisdom had left
the shop upon the tips of his toes with a
happy though foolish expression all over his
face, but the other went thoughtfully away
wearing a troubled and very puzzled look.
Almost always it seemed they did business
in opposite evils.

But the thing that puzzled me most in
all my talks with that unwieldy man, the
thing that puzzles me still, is that none that
had once done business in that shop ever
returned again; a man might come day after
day for many weeks, but once do business
and he never returned; so much the old man
told me, but when I asked him why, he only
muttered that he did not know.

It was to discover the wherefore of this
strange thing and for no other reason at all
that I determined myself to do business
sooner or later in the little room at the back
of that mysterious shop. I determined to
100

The Last Book of Wonder

exchange some very trivial evil for some
evil equally slight, to seek for myself an
advantage so very small as scarcely to give
Fate as it were a grip, for I deeply distrusted
these bargains, knowing well that man has
never yet benefited by the marvellous and
that the more miraculous his advantage
appears to be the more securely and tightly
do the gods or the witches catch him. In
a few days more I was going back to Eng-
land and I was beginning to fear that I
should be sea-sick : this fear of sea-sickness,
not the actual malady but only the mere
fear of it, I decided to exchange for a suitably
little evil. I did not know with whom I
should be dealing, who in reality was the
head of the firm (one never does when
shopping) but I decided that neither Jew
nor Devil could make very much on so small
a bargain as that.

I told the old man my project, and he
scoffed at the smallness of my commodity
trying to urge me to some darker bargain,
but could not move me from my purpose.
And then he told me tales with a somewhat
boastful air of the big business, the great
bargains that had passed through his hands.

101

-*i •".":"• f 7f^ Last Book of Wonder

A man had once run in there to try and
exchange death, he had swallowed poison
by accident and had only twelve hours to
live. That sinister old man had been able
to oblige him. A client was willing to ex-
change the commodity.

"But what did he give in exchange for
death?" I said.

"Life," said that grim old man with a
furtive chuckle.

"It must have been a horrible life," I
said.

"That was not my affair," the proprietor
said, lazily rattling together as he spoke a
little pocketful of twenty-franc pieces.

Strange business I watched in that shop
for the next few days, the exchange of odd
commodities, and heard strange mutterings
in corners amongst couples who presently
rose and went to the back room, the old man
following to ratify.

Twice a day for a week I paid my twenty
francs, watching life with its great needs
and its little needs morning and afternoon
spread out before me in all its wonderful
variety.

And one day I met a comfortable man

102

The Last Book of Wonder

with only a little need, he seemed to have
the very evil I wanted. He always feared
the lift was going to break. I knew too
much of hydraulics to fear things as silly as
that, but it was not my business to cure
his ridiculous fear. Very few words were
needed to convince him that mine was the evil
for him, he never crossed the sea, and I on
the other hand could always walk upstairs,
and I also felt at the time, as many must
feel in that shop, that so absurd a fear could
never trouble me. And yet at times it is
almost the curse of my life. When we both
had signed the parchment in the spidery
back room and the old man had signed and
ratified (for which we had to pay him fifty
francs each) I went back to my hotel, and
there I saw the deadly thing in the basement.
They asked me if I would go upstairs in the
lift, from force of habit I risked it, and I
held my breath all the way and clenched my
hands. Nothing will induce me to try such
a journey again. I would sooner go up to
my room in a balloon. And why? Because
if a balloon goes wrong you have a chance,
it may spread out into a parachute after it
has burst, it may catch in a tree, a hundred
103

The Last Book °f Wonder

and one things may happen, but if the lift
falls down its shaft you are done. As for
sea-sickness I shall never be sick again, I
cannot tell you why except that I know
that it is so.

And the shop in which I made this remark-
able, bargain the shop to which none return
when their business is done : I set out for it
next day. Blindfold I could have found
my way to the unfashionable quarter out
of which a mean street runs, where you take
the alley at the end, whence runs the cul de
sac where the queer shop stood. A shop
with pillars, fluted and painted red, stands
on its near side, its other neighbour is a
low-class jeweller's with little silver brooches
in the window. In such incongruous com-
pany stood the shop with beams with its
walls painted green.

In half an hour I stood in the cul de sac
to which I had gone twice a day for the last
week, I found the shop with the ugly painted
pillars and the jeweller that sold brooches,
but the green house with the three beams
was gone.

Pulled down, you will say, although in a
single night. That can never be the answer

104

The Last Book °f Wonder

to the mystery, for the house of the fluted
pillars painted on plaster and the low-class
jeweller's shop with its silver brooches (all
of which I could identify one by one) were
standing side by side.

A Story of Land
and Sea

t is written in the first Book
of Wonder how Captain Shard
of the bad ship Desperate
Lark, having looted the sea-
coast city Bombasharna, re-
tired from active life; and
resigning piracy to younger men, with the
good will of the North and South Atlantic,
settled down with a captured queen on his
floating island.

Sometimes he sank a ship for the sake of
old times but he no longer hovered along the
trade-routes; and timid merchants watched
for other men.

It was not age that caused him to leave
his romantic profession; nor un worthiness
of its traditions, nor gun-shot wound, nor
drink; but grim necessity and force majeure.

106

The Last Boo^ °f Wonder

Five navies were after him. How he gave
them the slip one day in the Mediterranean,
how he fought with the Arabs, how a ship's
broadside was heard in Lat. 23 N. Long. 4 E.
for the first time and the last, with other
things unknown to Admiralties, I shall pro-
ceed to tell.

He had had his fling, had Shard, captain
of pirates, and all his merry men wore
pearls in their ear-rings; and now the Eng-
lish fleet was after him under full sail along
the coast of Spain with a good North wind
behind them. They were not gaining
much on Shard's rakish craft, the bad ship
Desperate Lark, yet they were closer than
was to his liking, and they interfered with
business.

For a day and a night they had chased
him, when off Cape St. Vincent at about
six a. m. Shard took that step that decided
his retirement from active life, he turned
for the Mediterranean. Had he held on
Southwards down the African coast it is
doubtful whether in face of the interference
of England, Russia, France, Denmark and
Spain, he could have made piracy pay; but
in turning for the Mediterranean he took

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what we may call the penultimate step of
his life which meant for him settling down.
There were three great courses of action
invented by Shard in his youth, upon which
he pondered by day and brooded by night,
consolations in all his dangers, secret even
from his men, three means of escape as he
hoped from any peril that might meet him
on the sea. One of these was the floating
island that the Book of Wonder tells of,
another was so fantastic that we may doubt
if even the brilliant audacity of Shard could
ever have found it practicable, at least he
never tried it so far as is known in that tav-
.ern by the sea in which I glean my news,
and the third he determined on carrying
out as he turned that morning for the Med-
iterranean. True he might yet have prac-
tised piracy in spite of the step that he took,
a little later when the seas grew quiet, but
that penultimate step was like that small
house in the country that the business man
has his eye on, like some snug investment
put away for old age, there are certain final
courses in men's lives which after taking
they never go back to business.
He turned then for the Mediterranean

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with the English fleet behind him, and his
men wondered.

What madness was this, — muttered Bill
the Boatswain in Old Frank's only ear,—
with the French fleet waiting in the Gulf of
Lyons and the Spaniards all the way be-
tween Sardinia and Tunis: for they knew
the Spaniards' ways And they made a
deputation and waited upon Captain Shard,
all of them sober and wearing their costly
clothes, and they said that the Mediterra-
nean was a trap, and all he said was that the
North wind should hold. And the crew
said they were done.

So they entered the Mediterranean and
the English fleet came up and closed the
straits. And Shard went tacking along
the Moroccan coast with a dozen frigates
behind him. And the North wind grew
in strength. And not till evening did he
speak to his crew, and then he gathered
them all together except the man at the
helm, and politely asked them to come
down to the hold. And there he showed
them six immense steel axles and a dozen
low iron wheels of enormous width which
none had seen before; and he told his crew

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how all unknown to the world his keel had
been specially fitted for these same axles
and wheels, and how he meant soon to sail
to the wide Atlantic again, though not by
the way of the straits. And when they
heard the name of the Atlantic all his
merry men cheered, for they looked on the
Atlantic as a wide safe sea.

And night came down and Captain Shard
sent for his diver. With the sea getting up
it was hard work for the diver, but by mid-
night things were done to Shard's satis-
faction, and the diver said that of all the
jobs he had done — but finding no apt com-
parison, and being in need of a drink, silence
fell on him and soon sleep, and his comrades
carried him away to his hammock. All the
next day the chase went on with the English
well in sight, for Shard had lost time over-
night with his wheels and axles, and the
danger of meeting the Spaniards increased
every hour; and evening came when every
minute seemed dangerous, yet they still
went tacking on towards the East where
they knew the Spaniards must be.

And at last they sighted their topsails
right ahead, and still Shard went on. It

The Last Book of Wonder

was a close thing, but night was coming on,
and the Union Jack which he hoisted helped
Shard with the Spaniards for the last few
anxious minutes, though it seemed to anger
the English, but as Shard said, " There's no
pleasing everyone," and then the twilight
shivered into darkness.

"Hard to starboard," said Captain
Shard.

The North wind which had risen all day
was now blowing a gale. I do not know
what part of the coast Shard steered for,
but Shard knew, for the coasts of the world
were to him what Margate is to some of us.

At a place where the desert rolling up
from mystery and from death, yea, from
the heart of Africa, emerges upon the
sea, no less grand than her, no less terrible,
even there they sighted the land quite close,
almost in darkness. Shard ordered every
man to the hinder part of the ship and all
the ballast too; and soon the Desperate
Lark, her prow a little high out of the water,
doing her eighteen knots before the wind,
struck a sandy beach and shuddered, she
heeled over a little, then righted herself, and
slowly headed into the interior of Africa.

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The men would have given three cheers,
but after the first Shard silenced them and,
steering the ship himself, he made them a
short speech while the broad wheels pounded
slowly over the African sand, doing barely
five knots in a gale. The perils of the sea
he said had been greatly exaggerated.
Ships had been sailing the sea for hundreds
of years and at sea you knew what to do,
but on land this was different. They were
on land now and they were not to forget it.
At sea you might make as much noise as
you pleased and no harm was done, but on
land anything might happen. One of the
perils of the land that he instanced was that
of hanging. For every hundred men that
they hung on land, he said, not more than
twenty would be hung at sea. The men
were to sleep at their guns. They would
not go far that night; for the risk of being
wrecked at night was another danger pecul-
iar to the land, while at sea you might sail
from set of sun till dawn : yet it was essential
to get out of sight of the sea for if anyone
knew they were there they'd have cavalry
after them. And he had sent back Smer-
drak (a young lieutenant of pirates) to
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cover their tracks where they came up from
the sea. And the merry men vigorously
nodded their heads though they did not dare
to cheer, and presently Smerdrak came
running up and they threw him a rope by
the stern. And when they had done fifteen
knots they anchored, and Captain Shard
gathered his men about him and, standing
by the land-wheel in the bows, under the
large and clear Algerian stars, he explained
his system of steering. There was not
much to be said for it, he had with consid-
erable ingenuity detached and pivoted the
portion of the keel that held the leading
axle and could move it by chains which
were controlled from the land-wheel, thus
the front pair of wheels could be deflected
at will, but only very slightly, and they
afterwards found that in a hundred yards
they could only turn their ship four yards
from her course. But let not captains of
comfortable battleships, or owners even of
yachts, criticise too harshly a man who was
not of their time and who knew not modern
contrivances; it should be remembered also
that Shard was no longer at sea. His

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The Last Bool^ of Wonder

steering may have been clumsy but he did
what he could.

When the use and limitations of his
land-wheel had been made clear to his men,
Shard bade them all turn in except those on
watch. Long before dawn he woke them
and by the very first gleam of light they got
their ship under way, so that when those
two fleets that had made so sure of Shard
closed in like a great crescent on the Al-
gerian coast there was no sign to see of the
Desperate Lark either on sea or land; and
the flags of the Admiral's ship broke out
into a hearty English oath.

The gale blew for three days and, Shard
using more sail by daylight, they scudded
over the sands at little less than ten knots,
though on the report of rough water ahead
(as the lookout man called rocks, low hills
or uneven surface before he adapted him-
self to his new surroundings) the rate was
much decreased. Those were long summer
days and Shard who was anxious while the
wind held good to outpace the rumour of
his own appearance sailed for nineteen hours
a day, lying to at ten in the evening and

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hoisting sail again at three a. m. when it
first began to be light.

In those three days he did five hundred
miles; then the wind dropped to a breeze
though it still blew from the North, and for
a week they did no more than two knots
an hour. The merry men began to mur-
mur then. Luck had distinctly favoured
Shard at first for it sent him at ten knots
through the only populous districts well
ahead of crowds except those who chose to
run, and the cavalry were away on a local
raid. As for the runners they soon dropped
off when Shard pointed his cannon though
he did not dare to fire, up there near the
coast; for much as he jeered at the intel-
ligence of the English and Spanish Admirals
in not suspecting his manoeuvre, the only
one as he said that was possible in the cir-
cumstances, yet he knew that cannon had
an obvious sound which would give his
secret away to the weakest mind. Cer-
tainly luck had befriended him, and when
it did so no longer he made out of the occa-
sion all that could be made; for instance
while the wind held good he had never
missed opportunities to revictual, if he

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The Last Book °f Wonder

passed by a village its pigs and poultry
were his, and whenever he passed by water
he filled his tanks to the brim, and now that
he could only do two knots he sailed all
night with a man and a lantern before him:
thus in that week he did close on four
hundred miles while another man would
have anchored at night and have missed five
or six hours out of the twenty-four. Yet
his men murmured. Did he think the wind
would last for ever, they said. And Shard
only smoked. It was clear that he was think-
ing, and thinking hard. "But what is he
thinking about?" said Bill to Bad Jack.
And Bad Jack answered: "He may think
as hard as he likes but thinking won't get us
out of the Sahara if this wind were to drop."
And towards the end of that week Shard
went to his chart-room and laid a new course
for his ship a little to the East and towards
cultivation. And one day towards evening
they sighted a village, and twilight came
and the wind dropped altogether. Then
the murmurs of the merry men grew to oaths
and nearly to mutiny. "Where were
they now?" they asked, and were they
being treated like poor honest men ?

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The Last Book of Wonder

Shard quieted them by asking what they
wished to do themselves and when no one
had any better plan than going to the vil-
lagers and saying that they had been blown
out of their course by a storm, Shard un-
folded his scheme to them.

Long ago he had heard how they drove
carts with oxen in Africa, oxen were very
numerous in these parts wherever there was
any cultivation, and for this reason when
the wind had begun to drop he had laid his
course for the village : that night the moment
it was dark they were to drive off fifty yoke
of oxen; by midnight they must all be yoked
to the bows and then away they would go
at a good round gallop.

So fine a plan as this astonished the men
and they all apologised for their want of
faith in Shard, shaking hands with him
every one and spitting on their hands before
they did so in token of good will.

The raid that night succeeded admirably,
but ingenious as Shard was on land, and a
past-master at sea, yet it must be admitted
that lack of experience in this class of sea-
manship led him to make a mistake, a
slight one it is true, and one that a little

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The Last Book of Wonder

practice would have prevented altogether:
the oxen could not gallop. Shard swore at
them, threatened them with his pistol, said
they should have no food, and all to no avail :
that night and as long as they pulled the
bad ship Desperate Lark they did one knot
an hour and no more. Shard's failures like
everything that came his way were used as
stones in the edifice of his future success,
he went at once to his chart-room and
worked out all his calculations anew.

The matter of the oxen's pace made pur-
suit impossible to avoid. Shard therefore
countermanded his order to his lieutenant
to cover the tracks in the sand, and the
Desperate Lark plodded on into the Sahara
on her new course trusting to her guns.

The village was not a large one and the
little crowd that was sighted astern next
morning disappeared after the first shot
from the cannon in the stern. At first
Shard made the oxen wear rough iron bits,
another of his mistakes, and strong bits too.
"For if they run away/' he had said, "we
might as well be driving before a gale and
there's no saying where we'd find ourselves,"
but after a day or two he found that the bits

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The Last Book of Wonder

were no good and, like the practical man he
was, immediately corrected his mistake.

And now the crew sang merry songs all
day bringing out mandolins and clarionets
and cheering Captain Shard. All were
jolly except the captain himself whose face
was moody and perplexed; he alone expected
to hear more of those villagers; and the
oxen were drinking up the water every day,
he alone feared that there was no more to
be had, and a very unpleasant fear that is
when your ship is becalmed in a desert.
For over a week they went on like this doing
ten knots a day and the music and singing
got on the captain's nerves, but he dared
not tell his men what the trouble was. And
then one day the oxen drank up the last of
the water. And Lieutenant Smerdrak
came and reported the fact.

"Give them rum," said Shard, and he
cursed the oxen. "What is good enough
for me," he said, "should be good enough
for them," and he swore that they should
have rum.

"Aye, aye, sir," said the young lieutenant
of pirates.

Shard should not be judged by the orders

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The Last Book of Wonder

he gave that day, for nearly a fortnight he
had watched the doom that was coming
slowly towards him, discipline cut him off
from anyone that might have shared his
fear and discussed it, and all the while he
had had to navigate his ship, which even at
sea is an arduous responsibility. These
things had fretted the calm of that clear
judgment that had once baffled five navies.
Therefore he cursed the oxen and ordered
them rum, and Smerdrak had said "Aye,
aye, sir," and gone below.

Towards sunset Shard was standing on
the poop, thinking of death; it would not
come to him by thirst; mutiny first, he
thought. The oxen were refusing rum for
the last time, and the men were beginning
to eye Captain Shard in a very ominous
way, not muttering, but each man looking
at him with a sidelong look of the eye as
though there were only one thought among
them all that had no need of words. A
score of geese like a long letter "V" were
crossing the evening sky, they slanted their
necks and all went twisting downwards
somewhere about the horizon. Captain
Shard rushed to his chart-room, and pres-
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The Last Book of Wonder

ently the men came in at the door with Old
Frank in front looking awkward and twist-
ing his cap in his hand.

"What is it?" said Shard as though noth-
ing were wrong.

Then Old Frank said what he had come
to say: "We want to know what you be
going to do."

And the men nodded grimly.

"Get water for the oxen," said Captain
Shard, "as the swine won't have rum, and
they'll have to work for it, the lazy beasts.
Up anchor!"

And at the word water a look came into
their faces like when some wanderer suddenly
thinks of home.

"Water!" they said.

"Why not?" said Captain Shard. And
none of them ever knew that but for those
geese, that slanted their necks and suddenly
twisted downwards, they would have found
no water that night nor ever after, and the
Sahara would have taken them as she has
taken so many and shall take so many more.
All that night they followed their new
course: at dawn they found an oasis and
the oxen drank.

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And here, on this green acre or so with
its palm-trees and its well, beleaguered by
thousands of miles of desert and holding
out through the ages, here they decided to
stay: for those who have been without
water for a while in one of Africa's deserts
come to have for that simple fluid such a
regard as you, 0 reader, might not easily
credit. And here each man chose a site
where he would build his hut, and settle
down, and marry perhaps, and even forget
the sea; when Captain Shard having filled
his tanks and barrels peremptorily ordered
them to weigh anchor. There was much
dissatisfaction, even some grumbling, but
when a man has twice saved his fellows
from death by the sheer freshness of his
mind they come to have a respect for his
judgment that is not shaken by trifles. It
must be remembered that in the affair of
the dropping of the wind and again when
they ran out of water these men were at
their wits' end: so was Shard on the last
occasion, but that they did not know. All
this Shard knew, and he chose this occasion
to strengthen the reputation that he had
in the minds of the men of that bad ship by
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The Last Book °f Wonder

explaining to them his motives, which usu-
ally he kept secret. The oasis he said must
be a port of call for all the travellers within
hundreds of miles: how many men did you
see gathered together in any part of the
world where there was a drop of whiskey to
be had! And water here was rarer than
whiskey in decent countries and, such was
the peculiarity of the Arabs, even more
precious. Another thing he pointed out
to them, the Arabs were a singularly inquis-
itive people and if they came upon a ship
in the desert they would probably talk
about it; and the world having a wickedly
malicious tongue would never construe in
its proper light their difference with the
English and Spanish fleets, but would
merely side with the strong against the
weak.

And the men sighed, and sang the capstan
song and hoisted the anchor and yoked the
oxen up, and away they went doing their
steady knot, which nothing could increase.
It may be thought strange that with all
sail furled in dead calm and while the oxen
rested they should have cast anchor at all.
But custom is not easily overcome and long
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The Last Book of Wonder

survives its use. Rather enquire how many
such useless customs we ourselves preserve:
the flaps for instance to pull up the tops of
hunting-boots though the tops no longer
pull up, the bows on our evening shoes that
neither tie nor untie. They said they felt
safer that way and there was an end of it.

Shard lay a course of South by West and
they did ten knots that day, the next day
they did seven or eight and Shard hove to.
Here he intended to stop, they had huge
supplies of fodder on board for the oxen,
for his men he had a pig or so, plenty of
poultry, several sacks of biscuits and ninety-
eight oxen (for two were already eaten), and
they were only twenty miles from water.
Here he said they would stay till folks forgot
their past, someone would invent something
or some new thing would turn up to take
folks' minds off them and the ships he had
sunk: he forgot that there are men who are
well paid to remember.

Half way between him and the oasis he
established a little depot where he buried
his water-barrels. As soon as a barrel was
empty he sent hah0 a dozen men to roll it by
turns to the depot. This they would do at
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The Last Book °f Wonder

night, keeping hid by day, and next night
they would push on to the oasis, fill the
barrel and roll it back. Thus only ten
miles away he soon had a store of water,
unknown to the thirstiest native of Africa,
from which he could safely replenish his
tanks at will. He allowed his men to sing
and even within reason to light fires. Those
were jolly nights while the rum held out;
sometimes they saw gazelles watching them
curiously, sometimes a lion went by over
the sand, the sound of his roar added to
their sense of the security of their ship; all
round them level, immense lay the Sahara:
"This is better than an English prison,"
said Captain Shard.

And still the dead calm lasted, not even
the sand whispered at night to little winds;
and when the rum gave out and it looked
like trouble, Shard reminded them what
little use it had been to them when it was all
they had and the oxen wouldn't look at it.

And the days wore on with singing, and
even dancing at times, and at nights round
a cautious fire in a hollow of sand with only
one man on watch they told tales of the sea.
It was all a relief after arduous watches and

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sleeping by the guns, a rest to strained
nerves and eyes; and all agreed, for all that
they missed their rum, that the best place
for a ship like theirs was the land.

This was in Latitude 23 North, Longi-
tude 4 East, where, as I have said, a ship's
broadside was heard for the first time and
the last. It happened this way.

They had been there several weeks and
had eaten perhaps ten or a dozen oxen and
all that while there had been no breath of
wind and they had seen no one: when one
morning about two bells when the crew
were at breakfast the lookout man reported
cavalry on the port side. Shard who had
already surrounded his ship with sharpened
stakes ordered all his men on board, the
young trumpeter who prided himself on
having picked up the ways of the land,
sounded "Prepare to receive cavalry";.
Shard sent a few men below with pikes to
the lower port-holes, two more aloft with
muskets, the rest to the guns, he changed
the "grape" or "canister" with which the
guns were loaded in case of surprise, for
shot, cleared the decks, drew in ladders, and
before the cavalry came within range every-

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The Last Book of Wonder

thing was ready for them. The oxen were
always yoked in order that Shard could
manoeuvre his ship at a moment's notice.

When first sighted the cavalry were trot-
ting but they were coming on now at a slow
canter. Arabs in white robes on good
horses. Shard estimated that there were
two or three hundred of them. At sixty
yards Shard opened with one gun, he had
had the distance measured, but had never
practised for fear of being heard at the oasis:
the shot went high. The next one fell short
and ricochetted over the Arabs' heads.
Shard had the range then and by the time
the ten remaining guns of his broadside were
given the same elevation as that of his sec-
ond gun the Arabs had come to the spot
where the last shot pitched. The broad-
side hit the horses, mostly low, and rico-
chetted on amongst them; one cannon-ball
striking a rock at the horses' feet shattered
it and sent fragments flying amongst the
Arabs with the peculiar scream of things set
free by projectiles from their motionless
harmless state, and the cannon-ball went
on with them with a great howl, this shot
alone killed three men.

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The Last Book of Wonder

"Very satisfactory," said Shard rubbing
his chin. "Load with grape," he added
sharply.

The broadside did not stop the Arabs nor
even reduce their speed but they crowded
in closer together as though for company
in their time of danger, which they should
not have done. They were four hundred
yards off now, three hundred and fifty; and
then the muskets began, for the two men in
the crow's-nest had thirty loaded muskets
besides a few pistols, the muskets all stood
round them leaning against the rail; they
picked them up and fired them one by one.
Every shot told, but still the Arabs came on.
They were galloping now. It took some
time to load the guns in those days. Three
hundred yards, two hundred and fifty, men
dropping all the way, two hundred yards;
Old Frank for all his one ear had terrible
eyes; it was pistols now, they had fired all
their muskets; a hundred and fifty; Shard
had marked the fifties with little white
stones. Old Frank and Bad Jack up aloft
felt pretty uneasy when they saw the Arabs
had come to that little white stone, they
both missed their shots.

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"All ready?" said Captain Shard.

"Aye, aye, sir," said Smerdrak.

"Right," said Captain Shard raising a
finger.

A hundred and fifty yards is a bad range
at which to be caught by grape (or "case" as
we call it now), the gunners can hardly miss
and the charge has time to spread. Shard
estimated afterwards that he got thirty
Arabs by that broadside alone and as many
horses.

There were close on two hundred of them
still on their horses, yet the broadside of
grape had unsettled them, they surged
round the ship but seemed doubtful what to
do. They carried swords and scimitars in
their hands, though most had strange long
muskets slung behind them, a few unslung
them and began firing wildly. They could
not reach Shard's merry men with their
swords. Had it not been for that broadside
that took them when it did they might have
climbed up from their horses and carried the
bad ship by sheer force of numbers, but
they would have had to have been very
steady, and the broadside spoiled all that.
Their best course was to have concentrated

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all their efforts in setting fire to the ship but
this they did not attempt. Part of them
swarmed all round the ship brandishing
their swords and looking vainly for an easy
entrance; perhaps they expected a door,
they were not sea-faring people; but their
leaders were evidently set on driving off the
oxen not dreaming that the Desperate Lark
had other means of travelling. And this to
some extent they succeeded in doing.
Thirty they drove off, cutting the traces,
twenty they killed on the spot with their
scimitars though the bow gun caught them
twice as they did their work, and ten more
were unluckily killed by Shard's bow gun.
Before they could fire a third time from the
bows they all galloped away, firing back at
the oxen with their muskets and killing
three more, and what troubled Shard more
than the loss of his oxen was the way that
they manoeuvred, galloping off just when
the bow gun was ready and riding off by the
port bow where the broadside could not get
them, which seemed to him to show more
knowledge of guns than they could have
learned on that bright morning. What,
thought Shard to himself, if they should

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bring big guns against the Desperate Lark!
And the mere thought of it made him rail
at Fate. But the merry men all cheered
when they rode away. Shard had only
twenty-two oxen left, and then a score or so
of the Arabs dismounted while the rest rode
further on leading their horses. And the
dismounted men lay down on the port bow
behind some rocks two hundred yards away
and began to shoot at the oxen. Shard had
just enough of them left to manoeuvre his
ship with an effort and he turned his ship
a few points to the starboard so as to get a
broadside at the rocks. But grape was of
no use here as the only way he could get an
Arab was by hitting one of the rocks with
shot behind which an Arab was lying, and
the rocks were not easy to hit except by
chance, and as often as he manoeuvred his
ship the Arabs changed their ground. This
went on all day while the mounted Arabs
hovered out of range watching what Shard
would do; and all the while the oxen were
growing fewer, so good a mark were they,
until only ten were left, and the ship could
manoeuvre no longer. But then they all
rode off.

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The merry men were delighted, they cal-
culated that one way and another they had
unhorsed a hundred Arabs and on board
there had been no more than one man
wounded: Bad Jack had been hit in the
wrist; probably by a bullet meant for the
men at the guns, for the Arabs were firing
high. They had captured a horse and had
found quaint weapons on the bodies of the
dead Arabs and an interesting kind of
tobacco. It was evening now and they
talked over the fight, made jokes about their
luckier shots, smoked their new tobacco and
sang; altogether it was the j oiliest evening
they'd had. But Shard alone on the quar-
ter-deck paced to and fro pondering, brood-
ing and wondering. He had chopped off
Bad Jack's wounded hand and given him a
hook out of store, for captain does doctor
upon these occasions and Shard, who was
ready for most things, kept half a dozen or
so of neat new limbs, and of course a chopper.
Bad Jack had gone below swearing a little
and said he'd Be down for a bit, the men
were smoking and singing on the sand, and
Shard was there alone. The thought that
troubled Shard was: What would the Arabs

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do? They did not look like men to go
away for nothing. And at back of all his
thoughts was one that reiterated guns,
guns, guns. He argued with himself that
they could not drag them all that way on
the sand, that the Desperate Lark was not
worth it, that they had given it up. Yet
he knew in his heart that that was what
they would do. He knew there were
fortified towns in Africa, and as for its being
worth it, he knew that there was no pleas-
ant thing left now to those defeated men
except revenge, and if the Desperate Lark
had come over the sand why not guns ? He
knew that the ship could never hold out
against guns and cavalry, a week perhaps,
two weeks, even three: what difference did it
make how long it was, and the men sang:

Away we go,

Oho, Oho, Oho,
A drop of rum for you and me
And the world's as round as the letter 0
And round it runs the sea.

A melancholy settled down on Shard.
About sunset Lieutenant Smerdrak came

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up for orders. Shard ordered a trench to
be dug along the port side of the ship. The
men wanted to sing and grumbled at having
to dig, especially as Shard never mentioned
his fear of guns, but he fingered his pistols
and in the end Shard had his way. No one
on board could shoot like Captain Shard.
That is often the way with captains of pirate
ships, it is a difficult position to hold. Dis-
cipline is essential to those that have the
right to fly the skull-and-cross-bones, and
Shard was the man to enforce it. It was
starlight by the time the trench was dug to
the captain's satisfaction and the men that
it was to protect when the worst came to
the worst swore all the time as they dug.
And when it was finished they clamoured
to make a feast on some of the killed oxen,
and this Shard let them do. And they lit
a huge fire for the first time, burning abun-
dant scrub, they thinking that Arabs daren't
return, Shard knowing that concealment
was now useless. All that night they
feasted and sang, and Shard sat up in his
chart-room making his plans.

When morning came they rigged up the
cutter as they called the captured horse and

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told off her crew. As there were only two
men that could ride at all these became the
crew of the cutter. Spanish Dick and Bill
the Boatswain were the two.

Shard's orders were that turn and turn
about they should take command of the
cutter and cruise about five miles off to the
North East all the day but at night they
were to come in. And they fitted the horse
up with a flagstaff in front of the saddle so
that they could signal from her, and carried
an anchor behind for fear she should run
away.

And as soon as Spanish Dick had ridden
off Shard sent some men to roll all the bar-
rels back from the depot where they were
buried in the sand, with orders to watch the
cutter all the time and, if she signalled, to
return as fast as they could.

They buried the Arabs that day, remov-
ing their water-bottles and any provisions
they had, and that night they got all the
water-barrels in, and for days nothing hap-
pened. One event of extraordinary impor-
tance did indeed occur, the wind got up one
day, but it was due South, and as the oasis
lay to the North of them and beyond that

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they might pick up the camel track Shard
decided to stay where he was. If it had
looked to him like lasting Shard might have
hoisted sail but it dropped at evening as he
knew it would, and in any case it was not
the wind he wanted. And more days went
by, two weeks without a breeze. The dead
oxen would not keep and they had had to
kill three more, there were only seven left
now.

Never before had the men been so long
without rum. And Captain Shard had
doubled the watch besides making two more
men sleep at the guns. They had tired of
their simple games, and most of their songs,
and their tales that were never true were no
longer new. And then one day the monot-
ony of the desert came down upon them.

There is a fascination in the Sahara, a day
there is delightful, a week is pleasant, a fort-
night is a matter of opinion, but it was run-
ning into months. The men were perfectly
polite but the boatswain wanted to know
when Shard thought of moving on. It was
an unreasonable question to ask of the cap-
tain of any ship in a dead calm in a desert,
but Shard said he would set a course and let
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him know in a day or two. And a day or
two went by over the monotony of the
Sahara, who for monotony is unequalled by
all the parts of the earth. Great marshes
cannot equal it, nor plains of grass nor the
sea, the Sahara alone lies unaltered by the
seasons, she has no altering surface, no
flowers to fade or grow, year in year out she
is changeless for hundreds and hundreds of
miles. And the boatswain came again and
took off his cap and asked Captain Shard to
be so kind as to tell them about his new
course. Shard said he meant to stay until
they had eaten three more of the oxen as
they could only take three of them in the
hold, there were only six left now. But
what if there was no wind, the boatswain
said. And at that moment the faintest
breeze from the North ruffled the boat-
swain's forelock as he stood with his cap in
his hand.

"Don't talk about the wind to me" said
Captain Shard: and Bill was a little fright-
ened for Shard's mother had been a gipsy.

But it was only a breeze astray, a trick of
the Sahara. And another week went by
and they ate two more oxen.
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The Last Boofy of Wonder

They obeyed Captain Shard ostenta-
tiously now but they wore ominous looks.
Bill came again and Shard answered him in
Romany.

Things were like this one hot Sahara
morning when the cutter signalled. The
lookout man told Shard and Shard read the
message, " Cavalry astern" it read, and
then a little later she signalled," With guns."

"Ah," said Captain Shard.

One ray of hope Shard had; the flags on
the cutter fluttered. For the first time for
five weeks a light breeze blew from the
North, very light, you hardly felt it.
Spanish Dick rode in and anchored his horse
to starboard and the cavalry came on
slowly from the port.

Not till the afternoon did they come in
sight, and all the while that little breeze was
blowing.

"One knot," said Shard at noon. "Two
knots," he said at six bells and still it grew
and the Arabs trotted nearer. By five
o'clock the merry men of the bad ship
Desperate Lark could make out twelve long
old-fashioned guns on low wheeled carts
dragged by horses and what looked like

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lighter guns carried on camels. The wind
was blowing a little stronger now. "Shall
we hoist sail, sir?" said Bill.

"Not yet," said Shard.

By six o'clock the Arabs were just out-
side the range of cannon and there they
halted. Then followed an anxious hour or
so, but the Arabs came no nearer. They
evidently meant to wait till dark to bring
their guns up. Probably they intended to
dig a gun epaulment from which they could
safely pound away at the ship.

"We could do three knots," said Shard
half to himself as he was walking up and
down his quarter-deck with very fast short
paces. And then the sun set and they
heard the Arabs praying and Shard's merry
men cursed at the top of their voices to
show that they were as good men as they.

The Arabs had come no nearer, waiting
for night. They did not know how Shard
was longing for it too, he was gritting his
teeth and sighing for it, he even would have
prayed, but that he feared that it might
remind Heaven of him and his merry men.

Night came and the stars. "Hoist sail,"
said Shard. The men sprang to their
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places, they had had enough of that silent
lonely spot. They took the oxen on board
and let the great sails down, and like a lover
coming from over sea, long dreamed of,
long expected, like a lost friend seen again
after many years, the North wind came into
the pirates' sails. And before Shard could
stop it a ringing English cheer went away
to the wondering Arabs.

They started off at three knots and soon
they might have done four but Shard
would not risk it at night. All night the
wind held good, and doing three knots from
ten to four they were far out of sight of the
Arabs when daylight came. And then
Shard hoisted more sail and they did four
knots and by eight bells they were doing
four and a half. The spirits of those vol-
atile men rose high, and discipline became
perfect. So long as there was wind in the
sails and water in the tanks Captain Shard
felt safe at least from mutiny. Great men
can only be overthrown while their fortunes
are at their lowest. Having failed to depose
Shard when his plans were open to criticism
and he himself scarce knew what to do next
it was hardly likely they could do it now;

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and whatever we think of his past and his
way of living we cannot deny that Shard
was among the great men of the world.

Of defeat by the Arabs he did not feel so
sure. It was useless to try to cover his
tracks even if he had had time, the Arab
cavalry could have picked them up any-
where. And he was afraid of their camels
with those light guns on board, he had heard
they could do seven knots and keep it up
most of the day and if as much as one shot
struck the mainmast .... and Shard
taking his mind off useless fears worked out
on his chart when the Arabs were likely to
overtake them. He told his men that the
wind would hold good for a week, and, gipsy
or no, he certainly knew as much about the
wind as is good for a sailor to know.

Alone in his chart-room he worked it out
like this, mark two hours to the good for
surprise and finding the tracks and delay in
starting, say three hours if the guns were
mounted in their epaulments, then the
Arabs should start at seven. Supposing
the camels go twelve hours a day at seven
knots they would do eighty-four knots a day,
while Shard doing three knots from ten to

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four, and four knots the rest of the time, was
doing ninety and actually gaining. But
when it came to it he wouldn't risk more
than two knots at night while the enemy
were out of sight, for he rightly regarded
anything more than that as dangerous when
sailing on land at night, so he too did eighty-
four knots a day. It was a pretty race. I
have not troubled to see if Shard added up
his figures wrongly or if he under-rated the
pace of camels, but whatever it was the
Arabs gained slightly, for on the fourth day
Spanish Jack, five knots astern on what they
called the cutter, sighted the camels a very
long way off and signalled the fact to Shard
They had left their cavalry behind as Shard
supposed they would. The wind held good,
they had still two oxen left and could always
eat their " cutter", and they had a fair,
though not ample, supply of water, but the
appearance of the Arabs was a blow to Shard
for it showed him that there was no getting
away from them, and of all things he
dreaded guns. He made light of it to the
men: said they would sink the lot before
they had been in action half an hour: yet
he feared that once the guns came up it was

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only a question of time before his rigging
was cut or his steering gear disabled.

One point the Desperate Lark scored over
the Arabs and a very good one too, darkness
fell just before they could have sighted her
and now Shard used the lantern ahead as he
dared not do on the first night when the
Arabs were close, and with the help of it
managed to do three knots. The Arabs en-
camped in the evening and the Desperate
Lark gained twenty knots. But the next
evening they appeared again and this time
they saw the sails of the Desperate Lark.

On the sixth day they were close. On the
seventh they were closer. And then, a line
of verdure across their bows, Shard saw the
Niger River.

Whether he knew that for a thousand
miles it rolled its course through forest,
whether he even knew that it was there at
all; what his plans were, or whether he lived
from day to day like a man whose days are
numbered he never told his men. Nor can
I get an indication on this point from the
tank that I hear from sailors in their cups in
a certain tavern I know of. His face was
expressionless, his mouth shut, and he held

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his ship to her course. That evening they
were up to the edge of the tree trunks and
the Arabs camped and waited ten knots
astern and the wind had sunk a little.

There Shard anchored a little before sun-
set and landed at once. At first he explored
the forest a little on foot. Then he sent for
Spanish Dick. They had slung the cutter
on board some days ago when they found
she could not keep up. Shard could not
ride but he sent for Spanish Dick and told
him he must take him as a passenger. So
Spanish Dick slung him in front of the sad-
dle "before the mast" as Shard called it, for
they still carried a mast on the front of the
saddle, and away they galloped together.
"Rough weather," said Shard, but he sur-
veyed the forest as he went and the long and
short of it was he found a place where the
forest was less than half a mile thick and the
Desperate Lark might get through: but
twenty trees must be cut. Shard marked
the trees himself, sent Spanish Dick right
back to watch the Arabs and turned the
whole of his crew on to those twenty trees.
It was a frightful risk, the Desperate Lark
was empty, with an enemy no more than

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ten knots astern, but it was a moment for
bold measures and Shard took the chance of
being left without his ship in the heart of
Africa in the hope of being repaid by escap-
ing altogether.

The men worked all night on those twenty
trees, those that had no axes bored with
bradawls and blasted, and then relieved
those that had.

Shard was indefatigable, he went from
tree to tree showing exactly what way every
one was to fall, and what was to be done
with them when they were down. Some
had to be cut down because their branches
would get in the way of the masts, others
because their trunks would be in the way of
the wheels; in the case of the last the stumps
had to be made smooth and low with saws
and perhaps a bit of the trunk sawn off and
rolled away. This was the hardest work
they had. And they were all large trees,
on the other hand had they been small there
would have been many more of them and
they could not have sailed in and out, some-
times for hundreds of yards, without cutting
any at all: and all this Shard calculated on
doing if only there was time.

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The Last Book of Wonder

The light before dawn came and it looked
as if they would never do it at all. And
then dawn came and it was all done but one
tree, the hard part of the work had all been
done in the night and a sort of final rush
cleared everything up except that one huge
tree. And then the cutter signalled the
Arabs were moving. At dawn they had
prayed, and now they had struck their
camp. Shard at once ordered all his men
to the ship except ten whom he left at the
tree, they had some way to go and the Arabs
had been moving some ten minutes before
they got there. Shard took in the cutter
which wasted five minutes, hoisted sail
short-handed and that took five minutes
more, and slowly got under way.

The wind was dropping still and by the
time the Desperate Lark had come to the
edge of that part of the forest through which
Shard had laid his course the Arabs were no
more than five knots away. He had sailed
East half a mile, which he ought to have
done overnight so as to be ready, but he
could not spare time or thought or men
away from those twenty trees. Then
Shard turned into the forest and the Arabs

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The Last Book of Wonder

were dead astern. They hurried when they
saw the Desperate Lark enter the forest.

"Doing ten knots," said Shard as he
watched them from the deck. The Des-
perate Lark was doing no more than a knot
and a half for the wind was weak under the
lee of the trees. Yet all went well for a
while. The big tree had just come down
some way ahead, and the ten men were saw-
ing bits off the trunk.

And then Shard saw a branch that he had
not marked on the chart, it would just catch
the top of the mainmast. He anchored at
once and sent a hand aloft who sawed it half
way through and did the rest with a pistol,
and now the Arabs were only three knots
astern. For a quarter of a mile Shard
steered them through the forest till they
came to the ten men and that bad big tree,
another foot had yet to come off one corner
of the stump for the wheels had to pass over
it. Shard turned all hands on to the stump
and it was then that the Arabs came within
shot. But they had to unpack their gun.
And before they had it mounted Shard was
away. If they had charged things might
have been different. When they saw the

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Desperate Lark under way again the Arabs
came on to within three hundred yards and
there they mounted two guns. Shard
watched them along his stern gun but would
not fire. They were six hundred yards
away before the Arabs could fire and then
they fired too soon and both guns missed.
And Shard and his merry men saw clear
water only ten fathoms ahead. Then Shard
loaded his stern gun with canister instead
of shot and at the same moment the Arabs
charged on their camels; they came gal-
loping down through the forest waving long
lances. Shard left the steering to Smerdrak
and stood by the stern gun, the Arabs were
within fifty yards and still Shard did not
fire; he had most of his men in the stern
with muskets beside him. Those lances
carried on camels were altogether different
from swords in the hands of horsemen, they
could reach the men on deck. The men
could see the horrible barbs on the lance-
heads, they were almost at their faces when
Shard fired, and at the same moment the
Desperate Lark with her dry and sun-
cracked keel in air on the high bank of the
Niger fell forward like a diver. The gun

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The Last Book of Wonder

went off through the tree-tops, a wave came
over the bows and swept the stern, the
Desperate Lark wriggled and righted her-
self, she was back in her element.

The merry men looked at the wet decks
and at their dripping clothes. "Water,"
they said almost wonderingly.

The Arabs followed a little way through
the forest but when they saw that they had
to face a broadside instead of one stern gun
and perceived that a ship afloat is less vul-
nerable to cavalry even than when on shore,
they abandoned ideas of revenge, and com-
forted themselves with a text out of their
sacred book which tells how in other days
and other places our enemies shall suffer
even as we desire.

For a thousand miles with the flow of the
Niger and the help of occasional winds, the
Desperate Lark moved seawards. At first
he sweeps East a little and then Southwards,
till you come to Akassa and the open sea.

I will not tell you how they caught fish
and ducks, raided a village here and there
and at last came to Akassa, for I have said
much already of Captain Shard. Imagine
them drawing nearer and nearer the sea, bad

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men all, and yet with a feeling for something
where we feel for our king, our country or
our home, a feeling for something that
burned in them not less ardently than Our
feelings in us, and that something the sea.
Imagine them nearing it till sea birds ap-
peared and they fancied they felt sea breezes
and all sang songs again that they had not
sung for weeks. Imagine them heaving at
last on the salt Atlantic again.

I have said much already of Captain
Shard and I fear lest I shall weary you, O
my reader, if I tell you any more of so bad a
man. I too at the top of a tower all alone
am weary.

And yet it is right that such a tale should
be told. A journey almost due South from
near Algiers to Akassa in a ship that we
should call no more than a yacht. Let it be
a stimulus to younger men.

GUARANTEE TO THE READER

Since writing down for your benefit, O
my reader, all this long tale that I heard in
the tavern by the sea I have travelled in
Algeria and Tunisia as well as in the Desert.

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The Last Book of Wonder

Much that I saw in those countries seems
to throw doubt on the tale that the sailor
told me. To begin with the Desert does
not come within hundreds of miles of the
coast and there are more mountains to cross
than you would suppose, the Atlas moun-
tains in particular. It is just possible Shard
might have got through by El Cantara,
following the camel road which is many
centuries old; or he may have gone by
Algiers and Bou Saada and through the
mountain pass El Finita Dem, though that
is a bad enough way for camels to go (let
alone bullocks with a ship) for which reason
the Arabs call it Finita Dem — the Path of
Blood.

I should not have ventured to give this
story the publicity of print had the sailor
been sober when he told it, for fear that he
should have deceived you, 0 my reader; but
this was never the case with him as I took
good care to ensure: "in vino veritas" is a
sound old proverb, and I never had cause to
doubt his word unless that proverb lies.

If it should prove that he has deceived
me, let it pass; but if he has been the means
of deceiving you there are little things about

The Last Book of Wonder

him that I know, the common gossip of that
ancient tavern whose leaded bottle-glass
windows watch the sea, which I will tell at
once to every judge of my acquaintance,
and it will be a pretty race to see which of
them will hang him.

Meanwhile, 0 my reader, believe the
story, resting assured that if you are taken
in the thing shall be a matter for the hang-
man.

152

A Tale of

the Equator

e who is Sultan so remote to
the East that his dominions
were deemed fabulous in
Babylon, whose name is a by-
word for distance to-day in
the streets of Bagdad, whose
capital bearded travellers invoke by name
in the gate at evening to gather hearers to
their tales when the smoke of tobacco arises,
dice rattle and taverns shine; even he in that
very city made mandate, and said: "Let
there be brought hither all my learned men
that they may come before me and rejoice
my heart with learning."

Men ran and clarions sounded, and it was
so that there came before the Sultan all of
his learned men. And many were found
wanting. But of those that were able to
say acceptable things, ever after to be

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The Last Book of Wonder

named The Fortunate, one said that to the
South of the Earth lay a Land — said Land
was crowned with lotus — where it was
summer in our winter days and where it was
winter in summer.

And when the Sultan of those most dis-
tant lands knew that the Creator of All had
contrived a device so vastly to his delight
his merriment knew no bounds. On a
sudden he spake and said, and this was the
gist of his saying, that upon that line of
boundary or limit that divided the North
from the South a palace be made, where in
the Northern courts should summer be,
while in the South was winter; so should he
move from court to court according to his
mood, and dally with the summer in the
morning and spend the noon with snow.
So the Sultan's poets were sent for and bade
to tell of that city, foreseeing its splendour
far away to the South and in the future of
time; and some were found fortunate. And
of those that were found fortunate and were
crowned with flowers none earned more
easily the Sultan's smile (on which long days
depended) than he that foreseeing the city
spake of it thus:

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The Last Book of Wonder

"In seven years and seven days, 0 Prop
of Heaven, shall thy builders build it, thy
palace that is neither North nor South,
where neither summer nor winter is sole
lord of the hours. White I see it, very vast,
as a city, very fair, as a woman, Earth's
wonder, with many windows, with thy
princesses peering out at twilight; yea, I
behold the bliss of the gold balconies, and
hear a rustling down long galleries and the
doves' coo upon its sculptured eaves. O
Prop of Heaven, would that so fair a city
were built by thine ancient sires, the chil-
dren of the sun, that so might all men see it
even to-day, and not the poets only, whose
vision sees it so far away to the South and
in the future of time.

"O King of the Years, it shall stand mid-
most on that line that divideth equally the
North from the South and that parteth the
seasons asunder as with a screen. On the
Northern side when summer is in the North
thy silken guards shall pace by dazzling
walls while thy spearsmen clad in furs go
round the South. But at the hour of noon
in the midmost day of the year thy chamber-
lain shall go down from his high place and

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The Last Book of Wonder

into the midmost court, and men with
trumpets shall go down behind him, and he
shall utter a great cry at noon, and the men
with trumpets shall cause their trumpets
to blare, and the spearsmen clad in furs
shall march to the North and thy silken
guard shall take their place in the South,
and summer shall leave the North and go
to the South, and all the swallows shall rise
and follow after. And alone in thine inner
courts shall no change be, for they shall lie
narrowly along that line that parteth the
seasons in sunder and divideth the North
from the South, and thy long gardens shall
lie under them.

"And in thy gardens shall spring always
be, for spring lies ever at the marge of sum-
mer; and autumn also shall always tint thy
gardens, for autumn always flares at win-
ter's edge, and those gardens shall lie apart
between winter and summer. And there
shall be orchards in thy garden, too, with all
the burden of autumn on their boughs and
all the blossom of spring.

"Yea, I behold this palace, for we see
future things; I see its white wall shine in
the huge glare of midsummer, and the liz-

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The Last Book of Wonder

ards lying along it motionless in the sun, and
men asleep in the noonday, and the butter-
flies floating by, and birds of radiant plu-
mage chasing marvellous moths; far off the
forest and great orchids glorying there, and
iridescent insects dancing round in the light.
I see the wall upon the other side; the snow
has come upon the battlements, the icicles
have fringed them like frozen beards, a wild
wind blowing out of lonely places and cry-
ing to the cold fields as it blows has sent the
snowdrifts higher than the buttresses; they
that look out through windows on that side
of thy palace see the wild geese flying low
and all the birds of the winter, going by
swift in packs beat low by the bitter wind,
and the clouds above them are black, for it
is midwinter there; while in thine other
courts the fountains tinkle, falling on marble
warmed by the fire of the summer sun.

"Such, 0 King of the Years, shall thy
palace be, and its name shall be Erlath-
dronion, Earth's Wonder; and thy wisdom
shall bid thine architects build at once, that
all may see what as yet the poets see only,
and that prophecy be fulfilled."

And when the poet ceased the Sultan

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spake, and said, as all men hearkened with
bent heads:

"It will be unnecessary for my builders
to build this palace, Erlathdronion, Earth's
Wonder, for in hearing thee we have drunk
already its pleasures."

And the poet went forth from the Pres-
ence and dreamed a new thing.

16$

A Narrow Escape

It was underground.

In that dank cavern down
I below Belgrave Square the
(walls were dripping. But
[what was that to the magi-
'cian? It was secrecy that he
needed, not dryness. There he pondered
upon the trend of events, shaped destinies
and concocted magical brews.

For the last few years the serenity of his
ponderings had been disturbed by the noise
of the motor-bus; while to his keen ears
there came the earthquake-rumble, far off,
of the train in the tube, going down Sloane
Street; and when he heard of the world
above his head was not to its credit.

He decided one evening over his evil pipe,
down there in his dank chamber, that Lon-
don had lived long enough, had abused its

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The Last Book of Wonder

opportunities, had gone too far, in fine,
with its civilisation. And so he decided to
wreck it.

Therefore he beckoned up his acolyte
from the weedy end of the cavern, and,
"Bring me," he said, "the heart of the toad
that dwelleth in Arabia and by the moun-
tains of Bethany." The acolyte slipped
away by the hidden door, leaving that grim
old man with his frightful pipe, and whither
he went who knows but the gipsy people,
or by what path he returned; but within a
year he stood in the cavern again, slipping
secretly in by the trap while the old man
smoked, and he brought with him a little
fleshy thing that rotted in a casket of pure
gold.

"What is it?" the old man croaked.

"It is," said the acolyte, "the heart of
the toad that dwelt once in Arabia and by
the mountains of Bethany."

The old man's crooked fingers closed on
it, and he blessed the acolyte with his rasp-
ing voice and claw-like hand uplifted; the
motor-bus rumbled above on its endless
journey; far off the train shook Sloane
Street.

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"Come," said the old magician, "it is
time." And there and then they left the
weedy cavern, the acolyte carrying caul-
dron, gold poker and all things needful, and
went abroad in the light. And very won-
derful the old man looked in his silks.

Their goal was the outskirts of London;
the old man strode in front and the acolyte
ran behind him, and there was something
magical in the old man's stride alone, with-
out his wonderful dress, the cauldron and
wand, the hurrying acolyte and the small
gold poker.

Little boys jeered till they caught the old
man's eye. So there went on through Lon-
don this strange procession of two, too
swift for any to follow. Things seemed
worse up there than they did in the cavern,
and the further they got on their way to-
wards London's outskirts the worse London
got/ " It is time," said the old man, " surely."

And so they came at last to London's
edge and a small hill watching it with a
mournful look. It was so mean that the
acolyte longed for the cavern, dank though
it was and full of terrible sayings that the
old man said when he slept.

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They climbed the hill and put the caul-
dron down, and put there in the necessary
things, and lit a fire of herbs that no chemist
will sell nor decent gardener grow, and
stirred the cauldron with the golden poker.
The magician retired a little apart and
muttered, then he strode back to the caul-
dron and, all being ready, suddenly opened
the casket and let the fleshy thing fall in to
boil.

Then he made spells, then he flung up his
arms; the fumes from the cauldron entering
in at his mind he said raging things that he
had not known before and runes that were
dreadful (the acolyte screamed); there he
cursed London from fog to loam-pit, from
zenith to the abyss, motor-bus, factory,
shop, parliament, people. "Let them all
perish," he said, "and London pass away,
tram lines and bricks and pavement, the
usurpers too long of the fields, let them all
pass away and the wild hares come back,
blackberry and briar-rose."

"Let it pass," he said, "pass now, pass
utterly."

In the momentary silence the old man
coughed, then waited with eager eyes; and

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the long long hum of London hummed as it
always has since first the reed-huts were set
up by the river, changing its note at times
but always humming, louder now than it
was in years gone by, but humming night
and day though its voice be cracked with
age; so it hummed on.

And the old man turned him round to his
trembling acolyte and terribly said as he
sank into the earth: "You HAVE NOT

BROUGHT ME THE HEART OF THE TOAD
THAT DWELLETH IN ARABIA NOB BY THE
MOUNTAINS OF BETHANY!"

163

The Watch-tower

sat one April in Provence on
a small hill above an ancient
town that Goth and Vandal
as yet have forborne to
"bring up to date."

On the hill was an old worn
castle with a watch-tower, and a well with
narrow steps and water in it still.

The watch-tower, staring South with
neglected windows, faced a broad valley
full of the pleasant twilight and the hum of
evening things : it saw the fires of wanderers
blink from the hills, beyond them the long
forest black with pines, one star appearing,
and darkness settling slowly down on Var.
Sitting there listening to the green frogs
croaking, hearing far voices clearly but all
transmuted by evening, watching the win-
dows in the little town glimmering one by

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one, and seeing the gloaming dwindle sol-
emnly into night, a great many things fell
from mind that seem important by day, and
evening in their place planted strange
fancies.

Little winds had arisen and were whis-
pering to and fro, it grew cold, and I was
about to descend the hill, when I heard a
voice behind me saying, "Beware, beware."

So much the voice appeared a part of the
evening that I did not turn round at first;
it was like voices that one hears in sleep and
thinks to be of one's dream. And the word
was monotonously repeated, in French.

When I turned round I saw an old man
with a horn. He had a white beard mar-
vellously long, and still went on saying
slowly, "Beware, beware." He had clearly
just come from the tower by which he stood,
though I had heard no footfall. Had a man
come stealthily upon me at such an hour
and in so lonesome a place I had certainly
felt surprised; but I saw almost at once that
he was a spirit, and he seemed with his un-
couth horn and his long white beard and
that noiseless step of his to be so native to
that time and place that I spoke to him as

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one does to some fellow-traveller who asks
you if you mind having the window up.

I asked him what there was to beware of.

"Of what should a town beware," he said,
"but the Saracens?"

"Saracens? "I said.

"Yes, Saracens, Saracens," he answered
and brandished his horn.

"And who are you?" I said.

"I, I am the spirit of the tower," he said.

When I asked him how he came by so
human an aspect and was so unlike the
material tower beside him he told me that
the lives of all the watchers who had ever
held the horn in the tower there had gone
to make the spirit of the tower. "It takes
a hundred lives," he said. "None hold the
horn of late and men neglect the tower.
When the walls are in ill repair the Saracens
come: it was ever so."

"The Saracens don't come nowadays,"
I said.

But he was gazing past me watching, and
did not seem to heed me.

"They will run down those hills," he said,
pointing away to the South, "out of the
woods about nightfall, and I shall blow my

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horn. The people will all come up from the
town to the tower again; but the loopholes
are in very ill repair."

"We never hear of the Saracens now," I
said.

"Hear of the Saracens!" the old spirit
said. "Hear of the Saracens! They slip
one evening out of that forest, in the long
white robes that they wear, and I blow my
horn. That is the first that anyone ever
hears of the Saracens."

"I mean," I said, "that they never come
at all. They cannot come and men fear
other things." For I thought the old spirit
might rest if he knew that the Saracens can
never come again. But he said, "There is
nothing in the world to fear but the Sara-
cens. Nothing else matters. How can men
fear other things?"

Then I explained, so that he might have
rest, and told him how all Europe, and in
particular France, had terrible engines of
war, both on land and sea; and how the
Saracens had not these terrible engines
either on sea or land, and so could by no
means cross the Mediterranean or escape
destruction on shore even though they

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should come there. I alluded to the Euro-
pean railways that could move armies night
and day faster than horses could gallop.
And when as well as I could I had explained
all, he answered," In time all these things
pass away and then there will still be the
Saracens."

And then I said, "There has not been a
Saracen either in France or Spain for over
four hundred years."

And he said, "The Saracens! You do not
know their cunning. That was ever the
way of the Saracens. They do not come
for a while, no not they, for a long while,
and then one day they come."

And peering southwards, but not seeing
clearly because of the rising mist, he silently
moved to his tower and up its broken steps.

168

How Plash- Goo
Came to the Land
of None 's Desire

n a thatched cottage of enor-
mous size, so vast that we
might consider it a palace,
but only a cottage in the style
of its building, its timbers and
the nature of its interior, there
lived Plash-Goo.

Plash-Goo was of the children of the
giants, whose sire was Uph. And the lin-
eage of Uph had dwindled in bulk for the
last five hundred years, till the giants were
now no more than fifteen foot high; but
Uph ate elephants which he caught with his
hands.

Now on the tops of the mountains above
the house of Plash-Goo, for Plash-Goo lived
in the plains, there dwelt the dwarf whose
name was Lrippity-Kang.

The Last Book of Wonder

And the dwarf used to walk at evening on
the edge of the tops of the mountains, and
would walk up and down along it, and was
squat and ugly and hairy, and was plainly
seen of Plash-Goo.

And for many weeks the giant had suf-
fered the sight of him, but at length grew
irked at the sight (as men are by little things) ,
and could not sleep of a night and lost his
taste for pigs. And at last there came the
day, as anyone might have known, when
Plash-Goo shouldered his club and went
up to look for the dwarf.

And the dwarf though briefly squat was
broader than may be dreamed, beyond all
breadth of man, and stronger than men may
know; strength in its very essence dwelt in
that little frame, as a spark in the heart of a
flint: but to Plash-Goo he was no more than
mis-shapen, bearded and squat, a thing that
dared to defy all natural laws by being more
broad than long.

When Plash-Goo came to the mountain
he cast his chimahalk down (for so he named
the club of his heart's desire) lest the dwarf
should defy him with nimbleness; and
stepped towards Lrippity-Kang with grip-

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The Last Book of Wonder

ping hands, who stopped in his mountain-
ous walk without a word, and swung round
his hideous breadth to confront Plash-Goo.
Already then Plash-Goo in the deeps of
his mind had seen himself seize the dwarf
in one large hand and hurl him with his
beard and his hated breadth sheer down the
precipice that dropped away from that very
place to the land of None's Desire. Yet it
was otherwise that Fate would have it.
For the dwarf parried with his little arms
the grip of those monstrous hands, and grad-
ually working along the enormous limbs
came at length to the giant's body where by
dwarfish cunning he obtained a grip; and
turning Plash-Goo about, as a spider does
some great fly, till his little grip was suit-
able to his purpose, he suddenly lifted the
giant over his head. Slowly at first, by the
edge of that precipice whose base sheer dis-
tance hid, he swung his giant victim round
his head, but soon faster and faster; and at
last when Plash-Goo was streaming round
the hated breadth of the dwarf and the no
less hated beard was flapping in the wind,
Lrippity-Kang let go. Plash-Goo shot over
the edge and for some way further, out

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The Last Book °f Wonder

towards Space, like a stone; then he began
to fall. It was long before he believed and
truly knew that this was really he that fell
from this mountain, for we do not associate
such dooms with ourselves; but when he had
fallen for some while through the evening
and saw below him, where there had been
nothing to see, or began to see, the glimmer
of tiny fields, then his optimism departed;
till later on when the fields were greener and
larger he saw that this was indeed (and
growing now terribly nearer) that very land
to which he had destined the dwarf.

At last he saw it unmistakable, close, with
its grim houses and its dreadful ways, and
its green fields shining in the light of the
evening. His cloak was streaming from
him in whistling shreds.

So Plash-Goo came to the Land of None's
Desire.

172

The Three

Sailors ' Gamble

itting some years ago in the
ancient tavern at Over, one
afternoon in Spring, I was
waiting, as was my custom,
for something strange to hap-
pen. In this I was not always
disappointed for the very curious leaded
panes of that tavern, facing the sea, let a
light into the low-ceilinged room so myste-
rious, particularly at evening, that it some-
how seemed to affect the events within. Be
that as it may, I have seen strange things
in that tavern and heard stranger things
told.

And as I sat there three sailors entered
the tavern, just back, as they said, from sea,
and come with sunburned skins from a very
long voyage to the South; and one of them
had a board and chessmen under his arm,

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The Last Book of Wonder

and they were complaining that they could
find no one who knew how to play chess.
This was the year that the Tournament was
in England. And a little dark man at a
table in a corner of the room, drinking sugar
and water, asked them why they wished to
play chess; and they said that they would
play any man for a pound. They opened
their box of chessmen then, a cheap and
nasty set, and the man refused to play with
such uncouth pieces, and the sailors sug-
gested that perhaps he could find better
ones; and in the end he went round to his
lodgings near by and brought his own, and
then they sat down to play for a pound a
side. It was a consultation game on the
part of the sailors, they said all three must
play.

Well, the little dark man turned out to
be Stavlokratz.

Of course he was fabulously poor, and the
sovereign meant more to him than it did to
the sailors, but he didn't seem keen to play,
it was the sailors that insisted; he had made
the badness of the sailors' chessmen an
excuse for not playing at all, but the sailors
had over-ruled that, and then be told them

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The Last Book of Wonder

straight out who he was, and the sailors had
never heard of Stavlokratz.

Well, no more was said after that. Stav-
lokratz said no more, either because he did
not wish to boast or because he was huffed
that they did not know who he was. And
I saw no reason to enlighten the sailors
about him; if he took their pound they had
brought it on themselves, and my boundless
admiration for his genius made me feel that
he deserved whatever might come his way.
He had not asked to play, they had named
the stakes, he had warned them, and gave
them first move; there was nothing unfair
about Stavlokratz.

I had never seen Stavlokratz before, but
I had played over nearly every one of his
games in the World Championship for the
last three or four years; he was always of
course the model chosen by students. Only
young chess-players can appreciate my
delight at seeing him play first hand.

Well, the sailors used to lower their heads
almost as low as the table and mutter to-
gether before every move, but they mut-
tered so low that you could not hear what
they planned.

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The Last Book of Wonder

They lost three pawns almost straight off,
then a knight, and shortly after a bishop;
they were playing in fact the famous Three
Sailors' Gambit.

Stavlokratz was playing with the easy
confidence that they say was usual with him,
when suddenly at about the thirteenth move
I saw him look surprised; he leaned forward
and looked at the board and then at the sail-
ors, but he learned nothing from their vacant
faces; he looked back at the board again.

He moved more deliberately after that;
the sailors lost two more pawns, Stavlokratz
had lost nothing as yet. He looked at me
I thought almost irritably, as though some-
thing would happen that he wished I was
not there to see. I believed at first he had
qualms about taking the sailors' pound,
until it dawned on me that he might lose the
game; I saw that possibility in his face,
not on the board, for the game had become
almost incomprehensible to me. I cannot
describe my astonishment. And a few
moves later Stavlokratz resigned.

The sailors showed no more elation than
if they had won some game with greasy
cards, playing amongst themselves.

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The Last Book of Wonder

Stavlokratz asked them where they got
their opening. " We kind of thought of it,"
said one. "It just come into our heads
like/' said another. He asked them ques-
tions about the ports they had touched at.
He evidently thought as I did myself that
they had learned their extraordinary gam-
bit, perhaps in some old dependancy of
Spain, from some young master of chess
whose fame had not reached Europe. He
was very eager to find who this man could
be, for neither of us imagined that those
sailors had invented it, nor would anyone
who had seen them. But he got no infor-
mation from the sailors.

Stavlokratz could very ill afford the loss
of a pound. He offered to play them again
for the same stakes. The sailors began to
set up the white pieces. Stavlokratz
pointed out that it was his turn for first
move. The sailors agreed but continued to
set up the white pieces and sat with the
white before them waiting for him to move.
It was a trivial incident, but it revealed to
Stavlokratz and myself that none of these
sailors was aware that white always moves
first.

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The Last Book °f Wonder

Stavlokratz played on them his own open-
ing, reasoning of course that as they had
never heard of Stavlokratz they would not
know of his opening; and with probably a
very good hope of getting back his pound
he played the fifth variation with its tricky
seventh move, at least so he intended, but
it turned to a variation unknown to the
students of Stavlokratz.

Throughout this game I watched the
sailors closely, and I became sure, as only
an attentive watcher can be, that the one
on their left, Jim Bunion, did not even know
the moves.

When I had made up my mind about this
I watched only the other two, Adam Bailey
and Bill Sloggs, trying to make out which
was the master mind; and for a long while
I could not. And then I heard Adam
Bailey mutter six words, the only words I
heard throughout the game, of all their con-
sultations, "No, him with the horse's head."
And I decided that Adam Bailey did not
know what a knight was, though of course
he might have been explaining things to
Bill Sloggs, but it did not sound like that;
so that left BiU Sloggs. I watched Bill

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The Last Book of Wonder

Sloggs after that with a certain wonder; he
was no more intellectual than the others to
look at, though rather more forceful per-
haps. Poor old Stavlokratz was beaten
again.

Well, in the end I paid for Stavlokratz,
and tried to get a game with Bill Sloggs
alone, but this he would not agree to, it
must be all three or none: and then I went
back with Stavlokratz to his lodgings. He
very kindly gave me a game: of course it did
not last long but I am more proud of having
been beaten by Stavlokratz than of any
game that I have ever won. And then we
talked for an hour about the sailors, and
neither of us could make head or tale of them.
I told him what I had noticed about Jim
Bunion and Adam Bailey, and he agreed
with me that Bill Sloggs was the man,
though as to how he had come by that gam-
bit or that variation of Stavlokratz's own
opening he had no theory.

I had the sailors' address which was that
tavern as much as anywhere, and they
were to be there all that evening. As eve-
ning drew in I went back to the tavern, and
found there still the three sailors. And I

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The Last Book of Wonder

offered Bill Sloggs two pounds for a game
with him alone and he refused, but in the
end he played me for a drink. And then I
found that he had not heard of the "en
passant" rule, and believed that the fact of
checking the king prevented him from
castling, and did not know that a player can
have two or more queens on the board at the
same time if he queens his pawns, or that a
pawn could ever become a knight; and he
made as many of the stock mistakes as he
had time for in a short game, which I won.
I thought that I should have got at the
secret then, but his mates who had sat
scowling all the wrhile in the corner came up
and interfered. It was a breach of their
compact apparently for one to play chess
by himself, at any rate they seemed angry.
So I left the tavern then and came back
again next day, and the next day and the
day after, and often saw the three sailors,
but none were in a communicative mood.
I had got Stavlokratz to keep away, and
they could get no one to play chess with at
a pound a side, and I would not play with
them unless they told me the secret.

And then one evening I found Jim Bunion

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The Last Book of Wonder

drunk, yet not so drunk as he wished, for
the two pounds were spent; and I gave him
very nearly a tumbler of whiskey, or what
passed for whiskey in that tavern at Over,
and he told me the secret at once. I had
given the others some whiskey to keep them
quiet, and later on in the evening they must
have gone out, but Jim Bunion stayed with
me by a little table leaning across it and
talking low, right into my face, his breath
smelling all the while of what passed for
whiskey.

The wind was blowing outside as it does
on bad nights in November, coming up with
moans from the South, towards which the
tavern faced with all its leaded panes, so
that none but I was able to hear his voice as
Jim Bunion gave up his secret.

They had sailed for years, he told me,
with Bill Snyth; and on their last voyage
home Bill Snyth had died. And he was
buried at sea. Just the other side of the
line they buried him, and his pals divided
his kit, and these three got his crystal that
only they knew he had, which Bill got one
night in Cuba. They played chess with
the crystal.

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The Last Book °f Wonder

And he was going on to tell me about that
night in Cuba when Bill had bought the
crystal from the stranger, how some folks
might think that they had seen thunder-
storms, but let them go and listen to that
one that thundered in Cuba when Bill was
buying his crystal and they'd find that they
didn't know what thunder was. But then
I interrupted him, unfortunately perhaps,
for it broke the thread of his tale and set
him rambling a while, and cursing other
people and talking of other lands, China, Port
Said and Spain : but I brought him back to
Cuba agiun in the end. I asked him how
they could play chess with a crystal; and
he said that you looked at the board and
looked at the crystal and there was the game
in the crystal the same as it was on the
board, with all the odd little pieces looking
just the same though smaller, horses' heads
and whatnots; and as soon as the other man
moved the move came out in the crystal,
and then your move appeared after it, and
all you had to do was to make it on the
board. If you didn't make the move that
you saw in the crystal things got very bad
in it, everything horribly mixed and moving

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about rapidly, and scowling and making the
same move over and over again, and the
crystal getting cloudier and cloudier; it was
best to take one's eyes away from it then,
or one dreamt about it afterwards, and the
foul little pieces came and cursed you in
your sleep and moved about all night with
their crooked moves.

I thought then that, drunk though he was,
he was not telling the truth, and I promised
to show him to people who played chess all
their lives so that he and his mates could
get a pound whenever they liked, and I
promised not to reveal his secret even to
Stavlokratz, if only he would tell me all the
truth; and this promise I have kept till long
after the three sailors have lost their secret.
I told him straight out that I did not believe
in the crystal. Well, Jim Bunion leaned
forward then, even further across the table,
and swore he had seen the man from whom
Bill had bought the crystal and that he was
one to whom anything was possible. To
begin with his hair was villainously dark,
and his features were unmistakable even
down there in the South, and he could play
chess with his eyes shut, and even then he

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could beat anyone in Cuba. But ther was
more than this, there was the bargain 'he
made with Bill that told one who he was.
He sold that crystal for Bill Snyth's soul.

Jim Bunion leaning over the table with
his breath in my face nodded his head sev-
eral times and was silent.

I began to question him then. Did they
play chess as far away as Cuba? He said
they all did. Was it conceivable that any
man would make such a bargain as Snyth
made? Wasn't the trick well known?
Wasn't it in hundreds of books? And if
he couldn't read books mustn't he have
heard from sailors that that is the Devil's
commonest dodge to get souls from silly
people?

Jim Bunion had leant back in his own
chair quietly smiling at my questions but
when I mentioned silly people he leaned
forward again, and thrust his face close to
mine and asked me several times if I called
Bill Snyth silly. It seemed that these three
sailors thought a great deal of Bill Snyth
and it made Jim Bunion angry to hear any-
thing said against him. I hastened to say
that the bargain seemed silly though not of

The Last Book °f Wonder

course the man who made it; for the sailor
was almost threatening, and no wonder for
the whiskey in that dim tavern would mad-
den a nun.

When I said that the bargain seemed
silly he smiled again, and then he thundered
his fist down on the table and said that no
one had ever yet got the better of Bill Snyth
and that that was the worst bargain for
himself that the Devil ever made, and that
from all he had read or heard of the Devil
he had never been so badly had before as
the night when he met Bill Snyth at the inn
in the thunderstorm in Cuba, for Bill Snyth
already had the damnedest soul at sea;
Bill was a good fellow, but his soul was
damned right enough, so he got the crystal
for nothing.

Yes, he was there and saw it all himself,
Bill Snyth in the Spanish inn and the can-
dles flaring, and the Devil walking in out of
the rain, and then the bargain between
those two old hands, and the Devil going
out into the lightning, and the thunder-
storm raging on, and Bill Snyth sitting
chuckling to himself between the bursts of
the thunder.

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The Last Book of Wonder

But I had more questions to ask and inter-
rupted this reminiscence. Why did they
all three always play together? And a look
of something like fear came over Jim
Bunion's face; and at first he would not
speak. And then he said to me that it was
like this; they had not paid for that crystal,
but got it as their share of Jim Bunion's kit.
If they had paid for it or given something
in exchange to Bill Snyth that would have
been all right, but they couldn't do that
now because Bill was dead, and they were
not sure if the old bargain might not hold
good. And Hell must be a large and lonely
place, and to go there alone must be bad,
and so the three agreed that they would all
stick together, and use the crystal all three
or not at all, unless one died, and then the
two would use it and the one that was gone
would wait for them. And the last of the
three to go would bring the crystal with
him, or maybe the crystal would bring him.
They didn't think, he said, they were the
kind of men for Heaven, and he hoped they
knew their place better than that, but they
didn't fancy the notion of Hell alone, if Hell
it had to be. It was all right for Bill Snyth,
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The Last Book °f Wonder

he was afraid of nothing. He had known
perhaps five men that were not afraid of
death, but Bill Snyth was not afraid of Hell.
He died with a smile on his face like a child
in its sleep; it was drink killed poor Bill
Snyth.

This was why I had beaten Bill Sloggs;
Sloggs had the crystal on him while we
played, but would not use it; these sailors
seemed to fear loneliness as some people
fear being hurt; he was the only one of the
three who could play chess at all, he had
learnt it in order to be able to answer ques-
tions and keep up their pretence, but he had
learnt it badly, as I found. I never saw the
crystal, they never showed it to anyone;
but Jim Bunion told me that night that it
was about the size that the thick end of a
hen's egg would be if it were round. And
then he fell asleep.

There were many more questions that I
would have asked him but I could not wake
him up. I even pulled the table away so
that he fell to the floor, but he slept on, and
all the tavern was dark but for one candle
burning; and it was then that I noticed for
the first time that the other two sailors had

187

The Last Boofy °f Wonder

gone, no one remained, at all but Jim Bunion
and I and the sinister barman of that
curious inn, and he too was asleep.

When I saw that it was impossible to
wake the sailor I went out into the night.
Next day Jim Bunion would talk of it no
more; and when I went back to Stavlokratz
I found him already putting on paper his
theory about the sailors, which became
accepted by chess-players, that one of them
had been taught their curious gambit and
the other two between them had learnt all
the defensive openings as well as general
play. Though who taught them no one
could say, in spite of enquiries made after-
wards all along the Southern Pacific.

I never learnt any more details from any
of the three sailors, they were always too
drunk to speak or else not drunk enough to
be communicative. I seem just to have
taken Jim Bunion at the flood. But I kept
my promise, it was I that introduced them
to the Tournament, and a pretty mess they
made of established reputations. And so
they kept on for months, never losing a
game and always playing for their pound a
side. I used to follow them wherever they

188

The Last Bool^ °f Wonder

went merely to watch their play. They
were more marvellous than Stavlokratz
even in his youth.

But then they took to liberties such as
giving their queen when playing first-class
players. And in the end one day when all
three were drunk they played the best
player in England with only a row of pawns.
They won the game all right. But the ball
broke to pieces. I never smelt such a
stench in all my life.

The three sailors took it stoically enough,
they signed on to different ships and went
back again to the sea, and the world of
chess lost sight, for ever I trust, of the most
remarkable players it ever knew, who would
have altogether spoiled the game.

189

The Exile's Club

t was an evening party; and
something someone had said
to me had started me talking
about a subject that to me is
full of fascination, the subject
of old religions, forsaken gods.
The truth (for all religions have some of it),
the wisdom, the beauty, of the religions of
countries to which I travel have not the
same appeal for me; for one only notices in
them their tyranny and intolerance and the
abject servitude that they claim from
thought; but when a dynasty has been
dethroned in heaven and goes forgotten
and outcast even among men, one's eyes
no longer dazzled by its power find some-
thing very wistful in the faces of fallen gods
suppliant to be remembered, something
almost tearfully beautiful, like a long warm

190

The Last Book, °f Wonder

summer twilight fading gently away after
some day memorable in the story of earthly
wars. Between what Zeus, for instance, has
been once and the half-remembered tale
he is to-day there lies a space so great that
there is no change of fortune known to
man whereby we may measure the height
down which he has fallen. And it is the
same with many another god at whom once
the ages trembled and the twentieth cen-
tury treats as an old wives' tale. The
fortitude that such a fall demands is surely
more than human.

Some such things as these I was saying,
and being upon a subject that much
attracts me I possibly spoke too loudly,
certainly I was not aware that standing
close behind me was no less a person than
the ex-King of Eritivaria, the thirty islands
of the East, or I would have moderated
my voice and moved away a little to give him
more room. I was not aware of his presence
until his satellite, one who had fallen with
him into exile but still revolved about him,
told me that his master desired to know
me; and so to my surprise I was presented
though neither of them even knew my

191

The Last Bool^ °f Wonder

name. And that was how I came to be
invited by the ex-King to dine at his club.

At the time I could only account for his
wishing to know me by supposing that he
found in his own exiled condition some
likeness to the fallen fortunes of the gods
of whom I talked unwitting of his presence;
but now I know that it was not of himself
he was thinking when he asked me to dine
at that club.

The club would have been the most
imposing building in any street in London,
but in that obscure mean quarter of London
in which they had built it it appeared
unduly enormous. Lifting right up above
those grotesque houses and built in that
Greek style that we call Georgian, there
was something Olympian about it. To
my host an unfashionable street could
have meant nothing, through all his youth
wherever he had gone had become fashion-
able the moment he went there; words
like the East End could have had no mean-
ing to him.

Whoever built that house had enormous
wealth and cared nothing for fashion,
perhaps despised it. As I stood gazing at

192

The Last Book °f Wonder

the magnificent upper windows draped
with great curtains, indistinct in the evening,
on which huge shadows flickered my host
attracted my attention from the doorway,
and so I went in and met for the second time
the ex-King of Eritivaria.

In front of us a stairway of rare marble
led upwards, he took me through a side-door
and downstairs and we came to a banquet-
ing-hall of great magnificence. A long
table ran up the middle of it, laid for quite
twenty people, and I noticed the peculi-
arity that instead of chairs there were
thrones for everyone except me, who was
the only guest and for whom there was an
ordinary chair. My host explained to me
when we all sat down that everyone who
belonged to that club was by rights a king.

In fact none was permitted, he told me,
to belong to the club until his claim to a
kingdom made out in writing had been
examined and allowed by those whose
duty it was. The whim of a populace
or the candidate's own misrule were never
considered by the investigators, nothing
counted with them but heredity and law-
ful descent from kings, all else was ignored.

193

The Last Book °f Wonder

At that table there were those who had
once reigned themselves, others lawfully
claimed descent from kings that the world
had forgotten, the kingdoms claimed by
some had even changed their names.
Hatzgurh, the mountain kingdom, is almost
regarded as mythical.

I have seldom seen greater splendour than
that long hall provided below the level of the
street. No doubt by day it was a little
sombre, as all basements are, but at night
with its great crystal chandeliers, and the
glitter of heirlooms that had gone into exile,
it surpassed the splendour of palaces that
have only one king. They had come to
London suddenly most of those kings, or
their fathers before them, or forefathers;
some had come away from their kingdoms
by night, in a light sleigh, flogging the horses,
or had galloped clear with morning over the
border, some had trudged roads for days
from their capital in disguise, yet many had
had time just as they left to snatch up some
small thing without price in markets, for the
sake of old times as they said, but quite as
much, I thought, with an eye to the future.
And there these treasures glittered on that

194

The Last Book of Wonder

long table in the banqueting-hall of the base-
ment of that strange club. Merely to see
them was much, but to hear their story that
their owners told was to go back in fancy
to epic times on the romantic border of fable
and fact, where the heroes of history fought
with the gods of myth. The famous silver
horses of Gilgianza were there climbing
their sheer mountain, which they did by
miraculous means before the time of the
Goths. It was not a large piece of silver
but its workmanship outrivalled the skill of
the bees.

A yellow Emperor had brought out of the
East a piece of that incomparable porce-
lain that had made his dynasty famous
though all their deeds are forgotten, it had
the exact shade of the right purple.

And there was a little golden statuette of
a dragon stealing a diamond from a lady,
the dragon had the diamond in his claws,
large and of the first water. There had
been a kingdom whose whole constitution
and history were founded on the legend,
from which alone its kings had claimed their
right to the sceptre, that a dragon stole a
diamond from a lady. When its last king

195

The Last Book of Wonder

left that country, because his favourite gen-
eral used a peculiar formation under the fire
of artillery, he brought with him the little
ancient image that no longer proved him a
king outside that singular club.

There was the pair of amethyst cups of
the turbaned King of Foo, the one that he
drank from himself, and the one that he
gave to his enemies, eye could not tell which
was which.

All these things the ex-King of Eritivaria
showed me, telling me a marvellous tale of
each; of his own he had brought nothing,
except the mascot that used once to sit on
the top of the water tube of his favourite
motor.

I have not outlined a tenth of the splen-
dour of that table, I had meant to come
again and examine each piece of plate and
make notes of its history; had I known that
this was the last time I should wish to enter
that club I should have looked at its treas-
ures more attentively, but now as the wine
went round and the exiles began to talk I
took my eyes from the table and listened td
strange tales of their former state.

He that has seen better times has usually

196

The Last Book of Wonder

a poor tale to tell, some mean and trivial
thing has been his undoing, but they that
dined in that basement had mostly fallen
like oaks on nights of abnormal tempest, had
fallen mightily and shaken a nation. Those
who had not been kings themselves, but
claimed through an exiled ancestor, had
stories to tell of even grander disaster, his-
tory seeming to have mellowed their dy-
nasty's fate as moss grows over an oak a
great while fallen. There were no jealous-
ies there as so often there are among kings,
rivalry must have ceased with the loss of
their navies and armies, and they showed
no bitterness against those that had turned
them out, one speaking of the error of his
Prime Minister by which he had lost his
throne as "poor old Friedrich's Heaven-sent
gift of tactlessness."

They gossipped pleasantly of many things,
the tittle-tattle we all had to know when we
were learning history, and many a wonder-
ful story I might have heard, many a side-
light on mysterious wars had I not made use
of one unfortunate word. That word was
"upstairs."

The ex-King of Eritivaria having pointed

197

The Last Book of Wonder

out to me those unparalleled heirlooms to
which I have alluded, and many more
besides, hospitably asked me if there was
anything else that I would care to see, he
meant the pieces of plate that they had in
the cupboards, the curiously graven swords
of other princes, historic jewels, legendary
seals, but I who had had a glimpse of their
marvellous staircase, whose balustrade I
believed to be solid gold and wondering why
in such a stately house they chose to dine in
the basement, mentioned the word "up-
stairs." A profound hush came down on
the whole assembly, the hush that might
greet levity in a cathedral.

" Upstairs!" he gasped. "We cannot go
upstairs."

I perceived that what I had said was an
ill-chosen thing. I tried to excuse myself
but knew not how.

"Of course," I muttered, "members may
not take guests upstairs."

"Members!" he said to me. "We are
not the members!"

There was such reproof in his voice that
I said no more, I looked at him question-
ingly, perhaps my lips moved, I may have

198

The Last Book °f Wonder

said "What are you?" A great surprise
had come on me at their attitude.

"We are the waiters," he said.

That I could not have known, here at
least was honest ignorance that I had no
need to be ashamed of, the very opulence of
their table denied it.

"Then who are the members?" I asked.

Such a hush fell at that question, such a
hush of genuine awe, that all of a sudden a
wild thought entered my head, a thought
strange and fantastic and terrible. I
gripped my host by the wrist and hushed
my voice.

"Are they too exiles?" I asked.

Twice as he looked in my face he gravely
nodded his head.

I left that club very swiftly indeed, never
to see it again, scarcely pausing to say fare-
well to those menial kings, and as I left the
door a great window opened far up at the
top of the house and a flash of lightning
streamed from it and killed a dog.

199

The Three

Infernal Jokes

his is the story that the des-
olate man told to me on the
lonely Highland road one au-
tumn evening with winter
coming on and the stags roar-
ing.

The saddening twilight, the mountain
already black, the dreadful melancholy of
the stags' voices, his friendless mournful
face, all seemed to be of some most sorrow-
ful play staged in that valley by an outcast
god, a lonely play of which the hills were
part and he the only actor.

For long we watched each other drawing
out of the solitudes of those forsaken spaces.
Then when we met he spoke.

" I will tell you a thing that will make you
die of laughter. I will keep it to myself no

200

The Last Book of Wonder

longer. But first I must tell you how I
came by it. "

I do not give the story in his words with
all his woeful interjections and the misery of
his frantic self-reproaches for I would not
convey unnecessarily to my readers that
atmosphere of sadness that was about all he
said and that seemed to go with him where-
ever he moved.

It seems that he had been a member of a
club, a West-end club he called it, a respect-
able but quite inferior affair, probably in the
City: agents belonged to it, fire insurance
mostly, but life insurance and motor-agents
too, it was in fact a touts' club.

It seems that a few of them one evening,
forgetting for a moment their encyclopedias
and non-stop tyres, were talking loudly over
a card-table when the game had ended about
their personal virtues, and a very little man
with waxed moustaches who disliked the
taste of wine was boasting heartily of his
temperance. It was then that he who told
this mournful story, drawn on by the boasts
of others, leaned forward a little over the
green baize into the light of the two gutter-
ing candles wd revealed, no doubt a little
201

The Last Book of Wonder

shyly, his own extraordinary virtue. One
woman was to him as ugly as another.

And the silenced boasters rose and went
home to bed leaving him all alone, as he
supposed, with his unequalled virtue. And
yet he was not alone, for when the rest had
gone there arose a member out of a deep
arm-chair at the dark end of the room and
walked across to him, a man whose occupa-
tion he did not know and only now suspects.

"You have," said the stranger, "a sur-
passing virtue."

"I have no possible use for it," my poor
friend replied.

"Then doubtless you would sell it cheap,"
said the stranger.

Something in the man's manner or appear-
ance made the desolate teller of this mourn-
ful tale feel his own inferiority, which prob-
ably made him feel acutely shy, so that his
mind abased itself as an Oriental does his
body in the presence of a superior, or per-
haps he was sleepy, or merely a little drunk.
Whatever it was he only mumbled, " O
yes," instead of contradicting so mad a
remark. And the stranger led the way to
the room where the telephone was,

202

The Last Book of Wonder

"I think you will find my firm will give
a good price for it," he said: and without
more ado he began with a pair of pincers to
cut the wire of the telephone and the re-
ceiver. The old waiter who looked after
the club they had left shuffling round the
other room putting things away for the
night.

"Whatever are you doing of?" said my
friend.

"This way," said the stranger. Along
a passage they went and away to the back
of the club and there the stranger leaned out
of a window and fastened the severed wires
to the lightning conductor. My friend has
no doubt of that, a broad ribbon of copper,
half an inch wide, perhaps wider, running
down from the roof to the earth.

"Hell," said the stranger with his mouth
to the telephone; then silence for a while
with his ear to the receiver, leaning out of
the window. And then my friend heard
his poor virtue being several times repeated,
and then words like Yes and No.

"They offer you three jokes," said the
stranger, "which shall make all who hear
them simply die of laughter."

203

The Last Book of Wonder

I think my friend was reluctant then to
have anything more to do with it, he wanted
to go home; he said he didn't want jokes.

"They think very highly of your virtue,"
said the stranger. And at that, odd as it
seems, my friend wavered, for logically if
they thought highly of the goods they should
have paid a higher price.

"0 aU right," he said.

The extraordinary document that the
agent drew from his pocket ran something
like this:

"I in consideration of three

new jokes received from Mr. Montagu-
Montague, hereinafter to be called the agent,
and warranted to be as by him stated and
described, do assign to him, yield, abrogate
and give up all recognitions, emoluments,
perquisites or rewards due to me Here or
Elsewhere on account of the following virtue,

to wit and that is to say that all

women are to me equally ugly." The last
eight words being filled in in ink by Mr.
Montagu-Montague.

My poor friend duly signed it. "These
are the jokes," said the agent. They were
boldly written on three slips of paper.

204

The Last Book °f Wonder

"They don't seem very funny," said the
other when he had read them. "You are
immune," said Mr. Montagu-Montague,
"but anyone else who hears them will simply
die of laughter: that we guarantee."

An American firm had bought at the price
of waste paper a hundred thousand copies
of The Dictionary of Electricity written
when electricity was new, — and it had
turned out that even at the time its author
had not rightly grasped his subject, — the
firm had paid £10,000 to a respectable
English paper (no other in fact than the
Briton) for the use of its name, and to obtain
orders for The Briton Dictionary of Electric-
ity was the occupation of my unfortunate
friend. He seems to have had a way with
him. Apparently he knew by a glance at
a man, or a look round at his garden, whether
to recommend the book as "an absolutely
up-to-date achievement, the finest thing of
its kind in the world of modern science" or
as "at once quaint and imperfect, a thing
to buy and to keep as a tribute to those dear
old times that are gone." So he went on
with this quaint though usual business,
putting aside the memory of that night as

205

The Last Book °f Wonder

an occasion on which he had "somewhat
exceeded" as they say in circles where a
spade is called neither a spade nor an agri-
cultural implement but is never mentioned
at all, being altogether too vulgar.

And then one night he put on his suit of
dress clothes and found the three jokes in
the pocket. That was perhaps a shock.
He seems to have thought it over carefully
then, and the end of it was he gave a dinner
at the club to twenty of the members. The
dinner would do no harm he thought -
might even help the business, and if the joke
came off he would be a witty fellow, and
two jokes still up his sleeve.

Whom he invited or how the dinner went
I do not know for he began to speak rapidly
and came straight to the point, as a stick
that nears a cataract suddenly goes faster
and faster. The dinner was duly served,
the port went round, the twenty men were
smoking, two waiters loitered, when he after
carefully reading the best of the jokes told
it down the table. They laughed. One
man accidentally inhaled his cigar smoke
and spluttered, the two waiters overheard
and tittered behind their hands, one man,

206

The Last Book °f Wonder

a bit of a raconteur himself, quite clearly
wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled
dangerously in trying to keep it back, and
in the end he laughed too. The joke had
succeeded; my friend smiled at the thought;
he wished to say little deprecating things to
the man on his right; but the laughter did
not stop and the waiters would not be silent.
He waited, and waited wondering; the
laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder
now, and the waiters as loud as any. It
had gone on for three or four minutes when
this frightful thought leaped up all at once
in his mind: it was forced laughter! How-
ever could anything have induced him to
tell so foolish a joke? He saw its absurdity
as in revelation; and the more he thought
of it as these people laughed at him, even
the waiters too, the more he felt that he
could never lift up his head with his brother
touts again. And still the laughter went
roaring and choking on. He was very
angry. There was not much use in having
a friend, he thought, if one silly joke could
not be overlooked; he had fed them too.
And then he felt that he had no friends at
all, and his anger faded away, and a great

207

The Last Book of Wonder

unhappiness came down on him, and he got
quietly up and slunk from the room and
slipped away from the club. Poor man, he
scarcely had the heart next morning even to
glance at the papers, but you did not need
to glance at them, big type was bandied
about that day as though it were common
type, the words of the headlines stared at
you; and the headlines said: — Twenty-
Two Dead Men at a Club.

Yes, he saw it then: the laughter had not
stopped, some had probably burst blood
vessels, some must have choked, some suc-
cumbed to nausea, heart-failure must have
mercifully taken some, and they were his
friends after all, and none had escaped, not
even the waiters. It was that infernal joke.

He thought out swiftly, and remembers
clear as a nightmare, the drive to Victoria
Station, the boat-train to Dover and going
disguised to the boat: and on the boat pleas-
antly smiling, almost obsequious, two con-
stables that wished to speak for a moment
with Mr. Watkyn-Jones. That was his
name.

In a third-class carriage with handcuffs
on his wrists, with forced conversation when

208

The Last Book of Wonder

any, he returned between his captors to
Victoria to be tried for murder at the High
Court of Bow.

At the trial he was defended by a young
barrister of considerable ability who had
gone into the Cabinet in order to enhance
his forensic reputation. And he was ably
defended. It is no exaggeration to say that
the speech for the defence showed it to be
usual, even natural and right, to give a
dinner to twenty men and to slip away with-
out ever saying a word, leaving all, with
the waiters, dead. That was the impression
left in the minds of the jury. And Mr.
Watkyn-Jones felt himself practically free,
with all the advantages of his awful experi-
ence, and his two jokes intact. But law-
yers are still experimenting with the new
act which allows a prisoner to give evidence.
They do not like to make no use of it for
fear they may be thought not to know of the
act, and a lawyer who is not in touch with
the very latest laws is soon regarded as not
being up to date and he may drop as much
as £50,000 a year in fees. And therefore
though it always hangs their clients they
hardly like to neglect it.

209

The Last Book of Wonder

Mr. Watkyn-Jones was put in the witness
box. There he told the simple truth, and
a very poor affair it seemed after the im-
passioned and beautiful things that were
uttered by the counsel for the defence.
Men and women had wept when they heard
that. They did not weep when they heard
Watkyn-Jones. Some tittered. It no
longer seemed a right and natural thing to
leave one's guests all dead and to fly the
country. Where was Justice, they asked,
if* anyone could do that? And when his
story was told the judge rather happily
asked if he could make him die of laughter
too. And what was the j oke? For in so grave
a place as a Court of Justice no fatal effects
need be feared. And hesitatingly the pris-
oner pulled from his pocket the three slips
of paper: and perceived for the first time
that the one on which the first and best joke
had been written had become quite blank.
Yet he could remember it, and only too
clearly. And he told it from memory to the
Court.

"An Irishman once on being asked by his
master to buy a morning paper said in his
usual witty way, 'Arrah and begorrah and
210

The Last Book of Wondet

I will be after wishing you the top of the
morning. ' '

No joke sounds quite so good the second
time it is told, it seems to lose something
of its essence, but Watkyn-Jones was not
prepared for the awful stillness with which
this one was received; nobody smiled; and it
had killed twenty-two men. The joke was
bad, devilish bad; counsel for the defence
was frowning, and an usher was looking in a
little bag for something the judge wanted.
And at this moment, as though from far
away, without his wishing it, there entered
the prisoner's head, and shone there and
would not go, this old bad proverb: "As
well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb."
The jury seemed to be just about to retire.
"I have another joke," said Watkyn-
Jones, and then and there he read from the
second slip of paper. He watched the paper
curiously to see if it would go blank, occupy-
ing his mind with so slight a thing as men in
dire distress very often do, and the words
were almost immediately expunged, swept
swiftly as if by a hand, and he saw the paper
before him as blank as the first. And they
were laughing this time, judge, jury, counsel

211

The Last Book of Wonder

for the prosecution, audience and all, and
the grim men that watched him upon
either side. There was no mistake about
this joke.

He did not stay to see the end, and
walked out with his eyes fixed on the ground,
unable to bear a glance to the right or left.
And since then he has wandered, avoiding
ports and roaming lonely places. Two
years have known him on the Highland
roads, often hungry, always friendless, al-
ways changing his district, wandering lonely
on with his deadly joke.

Sometimes for a moment he will enter
inns, driven by cold and hunger, and hear
men in the evening telling jokes and even
challenging him; but he sits desolate and
silent, lest his only weapon should escape
from him and his last joke spread mourning
in a hundred cots. His beard has grown
and turned grey and is mixed with moss and
weeds, so that no one, I think, not even the
police, would recognise him now for that
dapper tout that sold The Briton Dictionary
of Electricity in such a different land.

He paused, his story told, and then his
lip quivered as though he would say more,

212

The Last Book of Wonder

and I believe he intended then and there to
yield up his deadly joke on that Highland
road and to go forth then with his three
blank slips of paper, perhaps to a felon's
cell, with one more murder added to his
crimes, but harmless at last to man. I
therefore hurried on, and only heard him
mumbling sadly behind me, standing bowed
and broken, all alone in the twilight, perhaps
telling over and over even then the last
infernal joke.

THE END

213

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